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PeopleFun chooses Google App Engine to offload infrastructure tasks and build games people love to play
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blog comes from Leon Campise, co-founder of
PeopleFun
, a Dallas-based creator of social games including
Word Chums
. Before launching PeopleFun, the company’s founders developed Age of Empires, a highly rated and popular strategy game.
We like keeping our PeopleFun team small in size – we’re at eight people today. We also like staying focused on creating engaging games, like Word Chums, instead of building infrastructure. Our business model works best when we can avoid having roles like network engineers on staff at PeopleFun.
If you’re growing a start-up company it’s important to focus on your core intellectual property, and outsource everything else where it’s cost effective. Designing, building-out and managing your own software development and production system is expensive. When we launched PeopleFun in 2012,
Google App Engine
was our choice for a cloud-based development platform that would let us scale up to millions of users and would easily handle any kind of computing challenge we could come up with.
For many multiplayer games, the backend infrastructure is only used to maintain “game state” – that is, tasks like the level a player has reached. The platform is not doing any computing.
With App Engine, we get much more than a place to store data: We’re using the platform to let players play on multiple devices at the same time and across different mobile platforms, to manage push notifications to players, and to instantly identify which of their Facebook friends are also players so they can connect with them socially. Building these capabilities demands a great deal of flexibility and horsepower from the platform -- App Engine provides that. Plus, it delivers sub-second response times for all of these actions, which makes players happier with our games.
Word Chums currently has over 300,000 active users a month, and growing. We also have another game, MixTwo, that’s popular with puzzle-game fans, and have a planned launch of a third game this summer. To make sure App Engine could handle our anticipated growth we test-drove it for performance and cost, simulating the impact of one million users and high numbers of players per minute.
Google has an excellent reputation for scaling systems, so we weren’t too surprised that App Engine handled a heavy load of users with no loss in performance and in a way that was cost-effective for us.
It’s a relief to know that we don’t have to re-design parts of our game server every time we cross a new threshold of user volume. We’ve all experienced this on previous systems: address one set of performance issues at 100,000 users, then retool it when you get to 500,000 users, and so on. App Engine handles all of the scaling issues seamlessly so our team can focus on functionality and content.
We pride ourselves on our ability to create games that people find challenging and want to play again and again. App Engine frees time for us to focus on making the user experience even better, while handling all the heavy computing tasks of our games.
-Contributed by Leon Campise, co-founder, PeopleFun
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