Homegrown tech stack gives Games24x7 the flexibility, extensibility, and scalability

As we are facing unprecedented challenges from Covid-19, however, during this period, a few industries have seen some positive impact, gaming being one of those. But it should be kept in mind that the online gaming market was already growing at an exponential rate. As per a report by KPMG and Google, the Indian online gaming market is growing 3.4 times and is estimated to touch US$ 1 billion by 2021. This number was US$ 290 million in 2016.

Games24x7 is an online gaming business in India, with a full-stack portfolio of Skill Games and Casual Games (RummyCircle and My11Circle). Games24x7 is a digital business, with a complete homegrown software stack that enables end-to-end control and gives the agility to respond with high speed.

“We were well prepared to handle the sudden spike during this period. Our software stack is written in a very flexible and extensible manner, which makes it easy for us to continue to add new games, manage user volumes by doing very incremental development.  Creating games is like making movies — you don’t know which one’s going to take off and which ones won’t. It is always good to be well prepared. To be able to deliver awesome game playing experience to every player, we have created a software that is scalable coupled with a hosting model that gives us the scalability when the demand arises,” Sandeep Agarwal, Chief Technology Officer, Games24x7 says.

Offer seamless work from home culture

Games24x7 have always had unlimited work from home policy, and this pandemic is just another situation that is testing the existing software and practices. During the lockdown period, they have scaled up the existing IT infrastructure. Their current firewall has a much higher throughput in terms of VPN server capacity.

They have further designed a seamless virtual onboarding process — from delivering laptops at the doorstep of their new employees across all their offices to assisting them with all necessary IT-related support.

Keeping critical functions operational

“Games24x7 is a software product company that is truly digital. We host the entire process of creation, what we call our ‘success formula’ — ideate, create, experiment, and analyse — on the cloud platform,” Agarwal highlights.

Agarwal further explains, Ideate: Ideation starts with mining a plethora of the user’s behavioural data, stored on the cloud. The query engines run on cloud servers, and provide the result sets that help ideate.

Create: Creation of the software product involves the entire software development lifecycle being managed and hosted on the cloud. It starts with development servers being rented from cloud service providers, and code being committed to cloud-based code repositories. Quality assurance engineers pull the code and run their automation test suites on the cloud-based test environments. As a part of the continuous deployment process, the change set is then taken to the production environment, which is also totally hosted on the CSP platform.

Experiment: A machine learning-driven experimentation engine, (hosted on the cloud) allows to generate statistically significant results from their experiment before the product/ feature becomes an integral part of each user experience going forward.

Analyse: Analysis of the results of the feature goes on well beyond the conclusion of the experimentation phase. At this stage, they work with a plethora of transactional databases and a comprehensive data catalogue, which is continuously queried upon, to get actionable, valuable, intuitive and, sometimes surprising ideas and insights.