Studio Spotlight: Internet Game Launches Public Beta
As part of our Studio Spotlight series, we’ve taken some time to speak to our customers and get a little deeper into what they’re building and understand their journey to use Hathora. We see this as a way for you to better understand the calculations you’d make when adopting dedicated servers and a chance to learn about the studios in our orbit. Enjoy!
Intro
From humble beginnings as a "Squid Game of the internet," Internet Game has rapidly evolved into a pioneering platform for casual, community-driven gaming. Excitingly, just last month, they launched their public beta.
What started as an experiment in gamifying experiences has blossomed into a seamless way for any group to instantly jump into fun multiplayer party games. With an ambitious vision to create a platform that hosts hundreds of games to build community and an already complex goal of creating high-quality internet-based games, the choice of building their platform on Hathora quickly improved the player experience, built confidence in scalability, and removed a significant pain of building out their own infrastructure.
This post will explore:
- What is Internet Game?
- What are the technical hurdles of building a community-first game platform?
- Which Hathora features enabled a complete server migration in four days?
Strap in and get ready to go behind the scenes to hear the story of how Internet Game leveled up with Hathora's dedicated server solution.
What is Internet Game?
The team at Internet Game aims to be the “game room” for online communities, distributed teams, and groups of friends. With a single link, you can power-up browser based 3-5 minute multiplayer games. The concept has caught the attention of teams from scrappy startups to large teams at Fortune 500 companies. While they’re still in beta, and aiming for a public launch soon, they’ve achieved broad reach and now look to deepen the quality and distribution of their games.
Internet Game’s Technical Challenges:
As you can tell from their target audience of communities, there are two main technical challenges that emerge when the team builds games:
- Accessibility
- Quality
On the accessibility front, Ahmed Bayoumy, CTO of Internet Game, shared with us how they can’t rely on community members having high-powered consoles to play these games. In order to have the lowest possible barrier to entry for their games, players just need a web browser to play. To enable this, Internet Game has developed a powerful core platform that allows their game developers to focus on building high-quality Unity games and have an automated path to deploy and test their games on any web browser.
The second challenge is quality of gameplay, which manifests via reliable server performance and fast player connections. If even just one or two community members have a poor gaming experience, an entire tight-knit community could easily be at risk of churning. This specific challenge became an Internet Game roadblock in building their platform. While they had largely addressed most of the accessibility challenges with internal solutions, they still needed a better solution to tackle the quality issue so they could better attract larger accounts. Before discovering Hathora, the team had both connectivity and performance issues on their servers, causing some communities to churn. This led Ahmed to search for a better alternative and led them to discover Hathora, quickly changing the course of Internet Game.
The Pivot to Hathora
Four features on Hathora quickly made it the primary solution for Internet Game’s server-quality challenges. I’ll briefly unpack them as shared with us by the Internet Game team.
Developer Experience
Ahmed shared that he was able to implement Hathora in only a week. Because Hathora is an entirely API driven platform, this small team could implement it and get back to focusing on finding Unity developers to build super community games. On top of that, all updates that Hathora gets, Internet Game gets too, which is the advantage of buying a tool instead of building it in-house.
Performance & Low Latency
In their first setup, the team experienced inconsistent performance and long launch times, hurting the business. Once they adopted Hathora, the power of the premium global edge-network was unmistakable. Strategically distributed servers close to players, instantly made the platform much more reliable to the communities they aim to serve. You can see your own ping on Hathora right here.
Hybrid Compute
Hathora offers a hybrid model of compute power with next-gen hardware. The combination of bare metal and cloud to maximize performance while keeping costs low.
Security & Server Authority
Since Internet Game hosts competitive games and has features for hosting tournaments with prizes, Hathora's built-in support around security and DDoS protection helps ensure a consistent and fair competitive experience.
A Business Decision
Finally, as a growing business, Internet Game couldn’t risk losing players to any of the above reasons so going with Hathora for premium dedicated servers has served the team very well.
Limits of Hathora
One function of Internet Game’s unique use case of having upwards of 6 games in development and live at the same time is that Hathora’s concept of applications is optimized today for studios working on one or two games. This led to some friction and limitations on CI integration. Our Hathora team has taken the Internet Game team’s feedback and looks to develop improved solutions for the future.
Conclusion
As Internet Game continues to grow and evolve, their partnership with Hathora sets the stage for a bright future. With a robust platform that can scale seamlessly and a dedication to creating engaging, high-quality games, Internet Game is well-positioned for their recent transition to public beta. The team's vision of becoming the go-to "game room" for online communities is within reach, and their relentless focus on accessibility and quality player experience ensures that they will continue to thrive in the dynamic world of online gaming. Stay tuned as Internet Game prepares to unveil more exciting features and games, bringing even more fun and connectivity to communities around the globe.
