There has never been a phenomenon like Pokémon Go. Since its launch in July of this year, the game has been a hit in almost every country it has been released in from Germany to Japan to America. Within just a week of its release, the game has surpassed the number of daily users of Twitter and Tinder. It even took the number one spot for average engagement on mobile phones away from Facebook.
The technology that the game uses has been developed by Niantic Labs, a spinoff from Google that was funded jointly by Nintendo, Alphabet, and The Pokémon Company.
Unlike Facebook, which uses cloud infrastructure of its own, Niantic is renting their cloud services in order to power their massively global location dataset and scalable server. It isn’t surprising to learn that Niantic relies on the cloud technology of Google’s Cloud Datastore NoSQL database and it’s App Engine.
There have been complaints about the growing pains like occasional crashes and not being able to use the tracking feature to the maximum capacity. What is truly amazing here is how well Niantic can keep up with the demand from all around the world. Niantic’s CEO said, during a prelaunch interview that smartphones have already been around for a while but it is location services and cloud computing is what makes this game possible.
It appears the benefits of cloud services for Pokémon Go are the same as enterprise apps including:
- New cloud services for developers.
- An ability to scale down or up as demand changes.
- Global infrastructure for meeting privacy requirements and local performance.
- Inexpensive platform for development.
- Proximity to mapping datasets.
Some companies have gone a step further with this and have started developing platforms which are specifically meant for developers. In order to capitalize on this growing opportunity for mobile gaming, NHN (Next Human Network) Entertainment launched such a service recently in South Korea.
The NHN cloud lets small companies concentrate limited resources to develop new, engaging games instead of managing infrastructure. Maybe one of them will create the next huge multiplayer online game. They save lots of time nowadays since they no longer need to wait for the correct infrastructure.
Like a lot of enterprises nowadays, NHN has chosen to build their cloud service with the help of OpenStack Cloud Computing. This has enabled them to reduce risk and costs.
The Takeaway
Game development companies which aspire to attain the same amount of success as Pokémon Go needs to use the cloud for global distribution and app development. If you aren’t already making full use of the cloud, you are most certainly missing out on a huge opportunity.
