SoftLayer powers online games

Hundreds of the top mobile, PC and social games with more than 100 million active players, are now supported by SoftLayer’s infrastructure platform. With SoftLayer, gaming companies can roll out virtual and bare-metal servers along with a suite of networking, security and storage solutions on demand and in real time. This choice and agility allows games companies to have the capacity they need exactly when they need it.

SoftLayer’s global platform provides the performance and scalability that hundreds of industry-leading and notable game studios – including Hothead Games, Geewa, Grinding Gear Games, Peak Games and Rumble Entertainment – require to test, deploy and grow their games.

Over the past year, Hothead Games has released six games, which have all risen to the top 10 in both the Apple and Google Play app stores, including the BIG WIN Sports™ series of games and the recently launched Rivals at War. Running their back-end database, Cloudant, on the SoftLayer platform has enabled Hothead Games to scale massively and economically, handling billions of database transactions per-day while delivering a superior experience to gamers.

“The ability to add tens of thousands of users overnight is the value of working with SoftLayer,” said Safa Sofuoglu, CTO of Peak Games, the largest and fastest-growing gaming company in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, and one of the three largest global social gaming companies. “SoftLayer understands the needs of game developers. We can very quickly double our infrastructure requirements when one of our games takes off, and easily manage and support new users without compromising on performance while not incurring massive costs.”

“We’re expanding our first-person shooter game “Ballistic” into Asian markets, and we wanted to partner with a cloud service provider that could deliver not only raw computing power but also high-quality network service,” said Jim Tso, senior producer for Rumble Entertainment. “SoftLayer’s data center in Singapore and global network footprint help us overcome any network latency issues, giving our users a great online experience.”

“’Path of Exile’ is unique among online action RPGs because players play on one large international realm. Softlayer's data centers on multiple continents (and the free bandwidth between them) let us run servers local to the individual players while still allowing them to play with their international friends if they choose to,” said Chris Wilson, managing director for Grinding Gear Games. “Softlayer's ability to provision new servers quickly allowed us to deal with the immense demand we faced when we launched Path of Exile's open beta. We're extremely pleased with SoftLayer and the server reliability that it allows us to offer our customers.”

“Game developers don’t have the time or resources to manage their own complex infrastructure because they need to focus on their core business – developing great games, launching on time and keeping players engaged,” said Marc Jones, vice president of product innovation for SoftLayer. “We’ve tailored our platform to meet gaming companies’ demands – from explosive, overnight growth to the performance and availability demands that come with everyday play.”