The online gaming industry has trebled since 2005 with approximately 65% of households now owning some kind of gaming device. Whilst this is music to the ears of game developers, it is placing a huge amount of pressure on data center operators to provide reliable infrastructure, connectivity, and storage that is able to deal with the ever-increasing data processing requirements of modern games.
So how data-hungry is online gaming? Let’s put this into context…
- Supercell, the creator of Clash of Clans amongst others, uses AWS analytics in their software development process. It scrutinizes 45 billion in-game events and 10 terabytes of data per day to tweak and enhance its games.
- World of Warcraft creators, Blizzard, depend on 40,000 servers across 27 data centers around the world to power the 1000 TB of data used by its subscribers every hour.
- Valve claims the traffic levels on Steam’s servers are growing by 75% a year with the system averaging 450-500 petabytes of data worldwide per month – working out at four to five exabytes a year. A standard game release on Steam can use 10-40 gigabytes of data per user download.
- Epic Games, creators of viral gaming hit Fortnite, rely on Amazon Web Services’ public cloud data centers to keep the game running 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Their S3 data warehouse currently has 14 petabytes of data and is increasing at a rate of 2 petabytes per month.
- Destiny 2’s 10.6 million players use on average 300 megabytes per hour, totaling over 3 petabytes per hour worldwide.
With the market now more competitive than ever and online gaming set to continue to grow in popularity, data center providers can’t afford to make mistakes when it comes to the likes of performance, reliability, and security.
With decades of expertise in the design and manufacture of network solutions, AFL Hyperscale have the capabilities and infrastructure to rapidly deliver pioneering, scalable network connectivity solutions across the globe to support evolving data center networks.
Your network can grow and depend upon AFL Hyperscale. The World, Connected.
