March 14, 2018

Google partners with Ubisoft to launch game server hosting platform

The alliance aims to simplify hosting for multiplayer games that have become popular in the gaming community.

Domain name service

Tech behemoth Google has partnered with gaming company Ubisoft to launch ‘Agones’, a game server hosting platform. By launching ‘Agones’ the alliance aims to simplify hosting multiplayer games for developers by leveraging Google’s open source system, Kubernetes.

With the increasing popularity of multiplayer games, Google say that hosting environments set for online-gaming are becoming increasingly complicated. They further added that scaling these environments was cumbersome and a proprietary software had to be deployed to mitigate this problem.

Google say that with ‘Agones’, scaling of hosting environments is possible at ease since traditional ways of managing clusters are replaced by Kubernetes clusters which allow servers to improvise server capabilities. Explaining the benefit of the ‘Agones’ platform, Mark Mandel, a developer at Google, commented:

Building Agones on top of Kubernetes has lots of other advantages too: it allows you to run your game workloads wherever it makes the most sense, for example, on game developers’ machines via platforms like minikube, in-studio clusters for group development, on-premises machines and on hybrid-cloud or full-cloud environments, including Google Kubernetes Engine.

Elated with the alliance and the launch of ‘Agones’, Carl Dionne, Development Director at Ubisoft, added:

Our goal is to continually find new ways to provide the highest-quality, most seamless services to our players so that they can focus on their games. Agones helps by providing us with the flexibility to run dedicated game servers in optimal datacenters, and by giving our teams more control over the resources they need.

This collaboration makes it possible to combine Google’s expertise in deploying Kubernetes at scale with our deep knowledge of game development pipelines and technologies.