Improving the Performance and Scalability of an MMO Game for Yager

Summary

ScienceSoft's helped Yager Development, a well-known video game development studio, to perfect the scalability and performance of its new MMO game.

About Yager Development

With over 20 years in the market, Yager Development is one of the largest game developers in Germany. It creates complex award-winning online video games with rich open worlds and emergent gameplay.

Challenge

Yager Development recently transitioned from AWS to Azure. After the migration, the team started facing scalability and performance issues in their new massively multiplayer online game. Meanwhile, the long-awaited official launch of the game was approaching. To ensure a flawless player experience from day one, the Customer needed immediate access to vetted senior .NET and Azure architects and developers.

Team Augmentation with .NET and Azure Professionals

Owing to ScienceSoft’s extensive experience in .NET, Azure, and real-time data processing architectures, the Yager Development turned to us for team augmentation. In 8 days, two ScienceSoft’s senior .NET and Azure professionals with experience in high-throughput, low-latency architectures joined the Customer’s development team.

Within two weeks, ScienceSoft’s experts explored the Customer’s application and prepared the first recommendations on improvements in the game architecture and infrastructure.

Thanks to ScienceSoft, in six months, Yager Development could process real-time data on Azure more quickly and effectively. In particular the Customer got:

• A new scalable and reliable pipeline for real-time data processing based on Azure Event Hub, Azure Stream Analytics, and Azure Cache for Redis.
• Reliable data transfer and improved app performance as a result of solving port exhaustion issues (by tunneling every push notification through its own execution context that starts when triggered by Azure Service Bus event).
• Established private endpoints to enable increased security.
• Improved code quality.
• Cloud infrastructure monitoring based on Azure Monitor and Azure Insights. The monitoring component collected both out-of-the-box metrics provided by Azure and custom ones, and notified the support team in case of critical events.
• Updated infrastructure as code (IaC) on Terraform, improved continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), including advice on how to automate Terraform runs using GitHub actions and prototypes for the workflows.
• Optimized cloud consumption costs due to choosing the right tiers for Azure Cache for Redis, implementing autoscaling of Azure SignalR, reducing the amount of telemetry, and more

We established close and effective collaboration and participated in all internal daily meetings of the Yager Development team. The team appreciated ScienceSoft's proactive approach, friendly spirit, and passion for Azure.

Key Outcomes for Yager Development

• With the new real-time data processing pipeline created and DevOps practices established and improved, 35K+ players enjoyed the smooth performance of the new MMO game upon its launch.
• Optimized cloud consumption costs.

Technologies and Tools

.NET, Azure Functions, Azure Redis Cache, Azure SignalR Service, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Virtual Machines, Terraform, Opsgenie.