Speaker
Mr
Rafael Garcia Leiva
(Adago Ingenieria)
Description
With the fast growth of the video games and entertainment industry - thanks to the
appearance of new games, new technologies and innovative hardware devices - the
capacity to react becomes critical for competing in the market of services and
entertainment. Therefore it is necessary to be able to count on advanced middleware
solutions and technological platforms that allow a fast unfolding of custom made
services.
Andago has developed the online games platform Andago Games that provides the
technological base necessary for the creation of online Games services around which
the main entertainment sites will be able to establish solid business models. The
platform Andago Games allows to quickly create online multiplayer games channels with
the following services for the final user:
* Pay per Play/ pay per subscription
* Reserving of gaming rooms or servers and advance management of games
* Advanced statistics
* Automatic game launch
* Clans
* Championships, downloads, chat, etc.
However, the platform requires important investments by operators and portals,
limiting the number of possible customers. Grid computing will reduce dramatically
the amount of these investments by means of sharing resources among different
operators and portals. Also, Grid computing offers the possibility to create virtual
organizations, where operators and portals could share games and contents, and even
their user’s base. Technically, the goal is to be able to share expensive resources
between providers and to allow billing based on usage. From a business perspective
our goal is to open new commercial opportunities in the domain of entertainment.
A common problem with online games is that operators, portals and games providers
would like to share resources and aim at sharing the costs to optimize their
businesses. Yet business entities are generally required to play all business roles.
The European market is still too fragmented and it is hard to reach the critical mass
of users needed to make online games businesses profitable and to ensure resource
liquidity. Having a Grid infrastructure makes it possible to divide tasks among
different actors and in consequence each actor could concentrate on the business it
knows best. Application developers provide the applications, portal providers create
the portals to attract users, and Telcos/ISP will provide the infrastructure
required. Such Virtual Organisations allow for profitable alliances and resource
integration. The outcome of a grid enabled online games platform will be to provide
the middleware to make this collaboration happen. The Grid ensures not only
decreasing costs for businesses, but allows for creating a global European market as
applications, infrastructure and users can be shared independently of political and
social borders, smoothly integrated and better exploited.
There are also big advantages for users. For example, they will have a larger offer,
better quality of service and certainly cheaper services. Grid centralized portals
would provide thousands of games and entertainment content from different providers.
Today, if one buys a new game and wants to play it online, the user has to connect to
a server (possibly) in the USA, unless a local server was set up. Having a Grid
infrastructure would largely ease that process. Users will simply connect to the
Grid, play and join the international community of users.
An online games scenario implies strong requirements on QoS for the provision in
real-time of distributed multimedia content all over the world. Also usage monitoring
is quite important due to the user profiling and its matching with the content
(underage access to inadequate contents). Privacy, billing and community building are
other properties relevant for online games and entertainment.
Summary
Andago plans to extend its Online Games platform to use grid middleware to solve
common problems found in online games portals. Technically, the goal is to be able to
share expensive resources between providers and to allow billing based on usage. From
a business perspective our goal is to open new commercial opportunities in the domain
of entertainment.
Author
Mr
Rafael Garcia Leiva
(Adago Ingenieria)
