How To Manage Fantasy Gamers’ Expectations During IPL

Dream11 and other sites that cover the Indian Premier League (IPL) need to process billions of transactions in real-time to provide users with a seamless experience.

Speed, scalability, personalization, and fraud prevention are critical for the success of platforms like Dream11.

Source : Getty

Today, everyone knows someone or the other who plays online games. Whether it is with playing a game like Call of Duty or doing so with a fantasy league like Dream11 in real-time, hundreds of thousands of people are online and playing. As per the Mordor Intelligence report, the value of the global gaming market is expected to reach $314.4 billion over the next five years, from $173.7 billion in 2020. Much of this growth is driven by the worldwide adoption of smartphones and mobile internet; global mobile gaming revenues reached close to $74 billion in 2020. Free-to-play (F2P) games came in a distant second at $22.7 billion. According to a recent Forbes article, 260 million people streamed IPL matches. The IPL is the most valued sports franchise in the world, eclipsing the NFL and NBA leagues in the United States in 2021.

The burden of delivering exceptional gaming experiences for hungry users is on the website owner. Dream11 and other sites that cover the Indian Premier League (IPL) need to process billions of transactions in real-time to provide users with a seamless experience that is needed in today’s world. Almost every task on the website happens with users having to take real-time decisions just before or during the ongoing matches. Such high-scale usage of websites requires fast, reliable, and scalable technologies to deliver that kind of user experience. Speed, scalability, personalization, and fraud prevention are critical for the success of such platforms. Delivering a seamless online gaming experience in the moments that matter separates the winners from the losers.

Technology innovations such as Gaming as a Service (GaaS), virtual and augmented reality, and the increasing availability of online streaming media platforms such as Twitch (acquired by Amazon) have become major factors contributing to the growth and changing nature of the gaming industry. However, the behind-the-scenes engine that powers Dream11 and other high-traffic sites is a real-time, NoSQL multi-model database that delivers predictable performance at an unlimited scale (often terabyte to petabyte scale of data).

Real-Time Analytics In Gaming

Hyper-personalization is the ability to predict and understand individual player behaviour quickly. A real-time database that provides hyper-personalization allows gaming companies to enhance the user’s experience so that they play for longer periods. The result is more engaged users who generate more revenue for the company through in-game purchases. The insights gleaned from real-time behavioural data can generate insights for further enhancements and help improve marketing campaigns based on a player’s behaviour and characteristics.

Technology Priorities For Game Developers And Architects

The fast-changing online gaming landscape directly impacts application development teams. More players generating more data helps define the requirements for building a high-performance gaming site. Here are a few things to consider.

• Ability to Scale High – Gaming and online betting applications require the ability to store, manage and retrieve massive volumes of data composed of player profiles, game performance data, statistics and session data generated by millions of users simultaneously. The ability to scale to petabyte levels to handle peak web traffic loads is particularly important because gaming tends to be event driven. This is extremely relevant for the ongoing IPL season in India.
• Processing Speed & Low Latency – Instant response (real-time) time is mandatory for any gaming application. Sluggish system performance and high latency can result in brand damage, customer abandonment, missed participation in games, loss of game stats, and loss of revenue opportunities. Delivering processing speeds in sub-milliseconds is an extremely difficult challenge in online gaming and fantasy league applications. Millions of simultaneous, real-time player interactions, item acquisitions, micro-bets, settlements and re-use of proceeds, recalculation of odds, and sophisticated fraud detection rules generate vast numbers of reads and writes against massive data volumes. Databases must provide predictable performance in sub-milliseconds to meet this demand without eroding user experience.
• Rapid, Iterative Development – Game development teams are in an ongoing race to introduce new revenue-generating games and features to keep customers engaged and stay ahead of the competition. Applications must be continuously enhanced with updated rule engines for fraud detection, regulatory compliance, banking changes, and other use cases. The days of twelve- to eighteen-month waterfall development cycles are long gone. Today’s small teams work in agile sprints, iterating quickly and pushing code into production multiple times a day.
• High Availability – Gamers are online throughout the day. They expect fast, reliable performance 24/7 and will not tolerate a site crash. If the game goes down, the brand is damaged, and customers leave, perhaps never returning. Gaming operators must ensure sufficient capacity, failover, and redundancy capabilities across clusters and data centres so that if a system component fails, user experience is not impacted, and data is not lost.
• Cost-Effective Hardware Utilisation – Expenditures on expensive, high-performance database servers are on the wane as development teams move to distributed database systems that run on low-cost, cloud-based commodity servers. However, the advantages of less expensive hardware are largely offset by the need to constantly add more servers and more memory per server – a situation often referred to as “server sprawl.” In addition to higher hardware costs, a sprawling server network introduces more complexity and risk of failure, which translates to higher maintenance expenses and system administration staffing. You should seek a database that reduces server footprint while maintaining predictable performance at any scale.

Online gaming is one of the fastest-growing Internet business sectors in Asia particularly and around the world, in general. It is important to meet today’s online gaming expectations and future-proof your modern data stack as user communities grow and their offerings expand.

New rules, new games, and higher stakes are altering technology priorities, with more emphasis on scalable performance, flexibility, and reliability now more than ever. Therefore, modern real-time data architecture is required to process the vast amount of data streamed during gaming seasons. The future of gaming is exciting, with many new technologies on the horizon that promise to take the gaming experience to the next level.

(The author is Vice President — Asia Pacific and Japan at Aerospike, which is a real-time Data Platform that enables organisations to act instantly across billions of transactions while reducing server footprint by up to 80 per cent)

Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs, and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, and views of ABP Network Pvt. Ltd. Fantasy sports games may be habit-forming or financially risky. Play responsibly. The information contained herein is merely based on parameters including but not limited to players’ past performance & records, players’ fitness & availability, ground conditions, weather conditions, etc. An individual intending to participate in any such fantasy sports game on any platform shall have to use his/her own skill, wisdom & judgement while creating a fantasy team. Accordingly, reader discretion is advised.