“Gamers require a high-performance, always on, graphically attractive and quick-responding experience,” writes SoftLayer Chief Strategy Officer George Karidis in a recent blog post. “If they don’t get that experience, they move on.”
Thus go the thought processes at the Dallas based company, which claims to be “the go-to provider” for top game developers such as Broken Bulg Game Studios, East Side Games, Kixeye, Hothead Games, and Storm8.
Delivered as IaaS, SoftLayer strives to give game developers the ability to roll out cloud-computing instances in minutes, or turn up dedicated servers in just two hours. It provides dedicated, virtualized, and managed servers in a “consumptive billing” (ie, pay as you go) model, with a focus on precluding the outage interruptions, network lag, and scalability problems caused by unpredictable, spiky usage patters that can cause gamers to go elsewhere.
As Karidis also notes, “Game developers do not have the time, operational expertise or resources to manage their own complex data centers because they need to focus on…developing new games, launching before the competition and keeping players engaged.”
SoftLayer’s dozen-plus datacenters are found throughout the world, including Dallas, Seattle, San Jose, Washington DC, Amsterdam, and Singapore, connected via private, 10Gb Ethernet point-to-point connections.