Akamai, one of the world leaders in content delivery and cloud security, recently held its first Indian Gaming Conclave in Bangalore. With 13 C-suite attendees from companies like Nodwin Gaming, Games91, Pocket League, Loco, Rolocule from the gaming industry, the event was hosted to highlight Akamai’s Gaming Solutions to help publishers deliver rich, high quality and flawless game-viewing and download experiences for end-users.
Our own Padmajit Khot sat down with Paul Jackson, senior manager at Akamai, to ask about how the company is bringing their services to India. As we’ve seen in recent years, the gaming scene in India has seen exponential growth, especially in the mobile sector. Akamai has taken a special interest in the booming sector of entertainment and has its own plans for entering the growing market
Q. What are the aspects of the gaming sector that you work on?
Jackson – “Within gaming, our biggest business at the moment is game downloads. Another side of what we (Akamai) do in gaming is the security side. Earlier, game companies never used to care about security, because of physical disk-based purchases. But about 5 years ago we moved to online multiplayer subscription-based services. With services like Fortnite or PUBG – they’re high profile. We see a high volume of attacks, ranging from DDOS, credential abuse which starts with account getting hacked. That info goes on the dark web. Introducing Two-Factor authentication also helps a lot.”
“In some ways, cloud gaming sessions are more secure! Because basically that machine is going to exist only when someone is playing. So as soon as they stop playing, that machine/server is de-instanced. So you have to be online to be hacked, but you still have to log in from somewhere.”
“Aside from providing security for gaming companies, what else are you planning on doing in India?”
Jackson – “eSports is interesting to us but it’s a broadcast business. And we already work with all the traditional broadcasters. So there’s no reason why we wouldn’t work with eSports broadcasters. Twitch has a very strong hold on that market, but it’s sort of breaking down now with all the other streaming services. We have a couple of other things more in the space of multiplayer. We’re thinking around the Blockchain issue. We’re looking at its potential. For banks and other logistical firms, it’s the main platform. Gaming’s not that complicated. It doesn’t usually need that level of validation. Even if people have been playing PUBG Mobile for a couple of years, you’ve got 100 diff assets. The issue with blockchain is that every time you have a transaction it adds to the chain. It gets really difficult to manage in terms of processing. We’re looking at it more from the financial side. But we’re not betting the farm on that in terms of gaming. We’re sticking to the video delivery side. “
Cloud gaming is something that the whole industry is skeptical about. As Jackson points out, game streaming is still at infancy, even with services like Google Stadia and NVIDIA Geforce Now being out there. With India, a heavily mobile-focused market, a different approach has to be taken. We’ve already seen how streaming games can eat up large chunks of data, and that’s where content delivery optimization comes in. It’s interesting how Paul Jackson talks about blockchain, which we’ve seen some gaming companies take advantage of in the live streaming business.
You can check out more about Akamai here.