How to Optimize Game Builds in the Cloud

We work with a long list of interesting companies spread across a range of industries here at Nasuni. In my role as VP of Product Strategy, I’ve worked closely with the IT leaders and technologists within these organizations to learn more about what they do, what they need, and how Nasuni can make them more efficient. But I have to say that our experience with the video game industry has been one of the more fascinating. We have some truly exciting joint customers with AWS in particular, and I recently hosted a webinar on how to optimize your game builds in the cloud with Kevin Ashman, a Senior Partner Solutions Architect with Amazon Game Tech. We covered how games are produced and tested, how the cloud makes this process more efficient, and why Nasuni and AWS accelerate time to market by 25%, drive higher-quality end products, and still save companies up to 50%.

Behind Great Games, Great Technology
The mantra at Amazon’s Game Tech group is that behind great games, there’s great technology. Most of the time, AWS is that technology, as they work with more than 90% of the world’s biggest game companies, plus plenty of smaller studios. AWS has services for every step of the process, from developing the concept for the game to building, testing, QA, publishing, and even building community. Their goal is to help companies build games faster, run them smarter, and grow their fan base.

Nasuni is a critical piece of that first step. “The Nasuni solution is great because it helps studios build faster by offering teams a global file system for quick and efficient file sharing,” Ashman says, “and it’s all backed by S3.”

Nasuni and Game Tech
This combination of Nasuni’s global file system and the unlimited S3 object store is perfectly suited to today’s gaming studios. In the past, games were built in a single studio location, with a large, dedicated team on site. Today, large publishers maintain multiple teams and studios around the world. In the webinar we’ll talk about how Nasuni and AWS allow companies to:

• Support a follow-the-sun collaboration model for developing, building, and testing games
• Accelerate remote work through a global file system, powerful virtual workstations, and more
• Recruit more talent across more locations
• Speed game production
• Reduce storage costs through deduplication and compression

This webinar is about how we’ve helped some of the biggest game developers in the world produce higher-quality games faster, while taking advantage of all the tools that are available to them in the cloud. One of my favorite customer examples is Electronic Arts. We were able to take all of their game builds, comprising 1.8 PBs of data spread across 38 different global locations, and consolidate that into a single global file system in AWS. With Nasuni, a game build can reach the right development team or the right testing group at the right time, without IT having to worry about managing or overseeing the flow of data from one office to the next.

In the past, EA might have only gotten through one version of a successful title per day. They told us they were able to increase this to 30 builds per day with Nasuni. They improved quality through more extensive testing and they accelerated their time to market because they could iterate more per day. Overall, our customers have told us that Nasuni can shorten time to release by up to 25%, improve game quality by increasing daily test builds by 30x, and reduce costs by 50% on average.

How do they do that? Watch the on-demand webinar and find out for yourself.