What type of game is the next generation? This is a question that gamers often need to think about.
In 2019 , Pu Guannan re-entered the game industry and became the Vice President of Business and Head of Innovation Business of FunPlus. At the beginning of 2022, with the strong support of FunPlus Group and founder Zhong Yingwu, he decided to start a business, founded Starscape, and created Pwnk. What is Pwnk ? The answer is: it is the next-generation "immersive experience live broadcast interactive Metaverse" platform centered on the US market and radiating to the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and other countries.
Pwnk Overseas Drag Racing Consolidates Competitive Barriers
At the end of April 2022 , Pwnk will be available on Steam. This new way of reaching a streaming audience instantly caused quite a stir in the streaming world, with more than 1,000 streamers soon joining Pwnk's Discord community.
In the Pwnk game, the live broadcast host can interact with the audience by hosting a live interactive game, and the audience can obtain lasting happiness from it and collect and trade virtual items.
Pwnk makes it easier for streamers to reach live viewers, while also making interactive live content creation an easy task for everyone. For viewers, it’s no longer just about watching content, but about participating, contributing, and even being the focus of their favorite host’s game show.
What needs to be pointed out here is that fans also personally participated in the "combat" of the game: the troops and resources used by the anchor in the game were converted from the comments and rewards of thousands of fans. As a reward, participants can also obtain tradable virtual assets from the confrontation and share the fruits of victory. It should be said that this is a special interaction.
Pwnk combines the advantages of game entertainment and live entertainment to achieve real-time real-time feedback, large-scale real-time participation, and entertainment forms with a longer life cycle. At the same time, it is highly interactive and can collect a variety of virtual items. The Pwnk platform allows users to participate in the game at any time, just like on the live broadcast platform, just come and go.
Pwnk is actively creating a richer content ecosystem. More than 3 months since the prototype product was launched, the number of games playable on Pwnk has increased to 7, and the Pwnk client has also been launched on the Steam platform. In the future, it will cover Japan, Southeast Asia and some countries in the Middle East through productization and non-operational methods.
Pu Guannan believes that the Pwnk platform has built real-time communication technical barriers and creative content barriers.
Pu Guannan said: " The reason why the Pwnk platform can realize the entertainment form of live video + large-scale interactive participation is that the Pwnk team has overcome the technical problems of real-time communication. With the support of Amazon cloud technology, it can realize thousands of people on the server side. Frame synchronization and real-time confrontation. This technical advantage has become a medium and long-term technical barrier for Pwnk."
In addition, to make Pwnk a life-cycle entertainment platform, the challenge is to constantly create new games and new ideas to make users really feel interesting. The core of fun is to quickly catch the attention of the audience and players within three to five minutes, so that they can immediately participate in the game. At the same time, we must continue to launch new games, so that more and more players are willing to enter and stay on the Pwnk platform. The Pwnk team regards creativity and content creation as the core competition barrier.
In terms of continuous supply of live interactive game content, Pu Guannan said that Pwnk plans to develop 4-6 games per month, and open editors to players to encourage players to create more interactive game content.
Amazon Cloud Technology Guarantees Steady and Long-term Development
The PC client of the Pwnk platform was launched at the end of April this year. This is a PC game client for anchors. Currently, anchors can use our PC client to directly interact with viewers on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook.
In the next one or two years, Pwnk will develop player clients, including mobile terminals, Meta cloud games, consoles, and VR, to realize a complete cloud game client experience step by step. In the player client, users can participate in activities with audiences and anchors, participate in game interactions, and participate in trade unions, social networking, and various activities.
Based on Pwnk's overall product development ideas, the core question is how to realize these business needs? For example, how to quickly verify the idea of Pwnk. This is very important for entrepreneurial teams. Most of the research and development energy is focused on the product itself, and there is no more time for operation and maintenance; at the same time, the overall cost must be controllable, and third-party help is needed to avoid security compliance; in addition, based on existing technologies, After the product was launched, it has begun to cover many countries around the world. Pwnk needs to know how to deploy it efficiently and effectively to reach more players. In fact, Amazon cloud technology has done a lot to help Pwnk improve its business
Pu Guannan said: " Amazon cloud technology provides us with a very advanced service, Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS). We are with Amazon cloud technology. The delay from the beginning was 15 seconds, then it was reduced to 8 seconds, and finally it was reduced to 1 second. , to help us realize that players from all over the world and on different platforms play games through video. If there is no IVS technology, even if we have this idea, we cannot do it technically. In addition, Amazon Elemental MediaLive of Amazon Cloud Technology It helps us encode video to adapt to different devices, Amazon S3 facilitates our video storage, and Amazon EKS helps us quickly build server clusters, allowing us to go online quickly in the early stage, iterate at a high speed, and promote business smoothly.”
Pwnk first started research and development in November 2020, and its business was actually launched in January 2021, which is equivalent to completing the development and launch of the initial interactive live broadcast platform within two months with the support of Amazon Cloud Technology. At the usual pace of Internet R&D, this is pretty incredible. This is a very powerful boost to Pwnk's early success, enabling Pwnk to focus most of its energy on product development itself, and focus on what Pwnk is best at.
"How can we go online within two months? We didn't have full-time operation and maintenance personnel at that time. Our first CTO deployed the entire platform by himself. We use Amazon Cloud Technology's exclusive solutions for the game industry, including Amazon IVS, Amazon EKS, we use these two services to completely solve the backend through cloud technology. Through containerization, our research and development on the backend is very intensive. At the same time, we basically don’t have to spend too much energy on security In terms of compliance, because in the end Amazon cloud technology has helped us solve this problem." Pu Guannan said with emotion.
Liu Lili, Solution Architect Director of Amazon Cloud Technology's Digital Native Business Unit, said: "Amazon Cloud Technology solutions, which help Pwnk accelerate innovation and global deployment, ensure the stability and long-term development of the platform in at least five aspects. First, build ultra-low-latency streaming media Amazon IVS is the end-to-end solution for live broadcasting; secondly, the rich cloud services of Amazon Cloud Technology help Pwnk to operate and maintain efficiently, reduce costs and increase efficiency, and improve experience. Thirdly, Amazon Connect can make it very simple for customers to establish a call center; In addition, Amazon Cloud Technology has created exclusive solutions for the game industry through a wealth of services; finally, Amazon Cloud Technology’s extensive global security compliance certifications create a security compliance base for game developers.”
Conclusion
A relatively core problem that Chinese games will encounter when they go overseas is mainly for overseas users, such as American users and European users. The delays of users in each region are very far apart, especially when facing different platforms. The latency of each platform is also different, so you must rely on cloud services.
For Chinese game companies going overseas, the core thing is how to verify their product models and find a more reliable commercialization path. In addition, it is data processing.
A game actually has a lot of data: transaction data, equipment data, and various data that need to be cached. It is actually unrealistic to use a database to solve all these data problems in the traditional way, because the volume is very large, because after the game is started, there will be a lot of volume, and the transaction volume will be very high. This is one of them.
Second, each data processing method is different. For example, the transaction type requires that it must not be lost or damaged, while other things require extreme speed, because after buying this equipment, it will be in the game immediately. Once it is used in China, you can't wait for a long time.
Therefore, for the needs of such different business scenarios, only on the cloud platform can the needs of different applications be met, and there are dedicated equipment and dedicated services to solve them.
The way of the cloud connects customers around the world together, and there is high-speed broadband in the middle for interconnection. If a piece of data flies from one end of the earth to the other, it takes 125 milliseconds to arrive at the speed of light, so the time left for the platform to process is very limited. In such a short time, how can these data be processed well? Liu Lili concluded , nothing more than three ways to go:
First, the extreme optimization algorithm makes data processing very fast.
Second, the supply of more unlimited resources, because the more resources, the faster you can run.
Third, a stable global network.
And this is also the advantage of Amazon cloud technology.