For small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs, how should emerging technologies such as cloud computing be used to help enterprises develop business and accelerate innovation?
As the industry's first "immersive experience live broadcast interactive metaverse platform", the Pwnk project from FunPlus Game Company has come out with its own experience. I believe it can bring a lot of inspiration and reference to the majority of enterprises.
A new way to play interactive games
As we all know, with the rapid development of mobile Internet in recent years, various game and live broadcast technologies can be said to be changing with each passing day. As a leading game company in the industry, FunPlus is also thinking about how to use some new tracks and new technologies, especially the blessing of cloud technology and cloud services, to help enterprises accelerate innovation.
Pwnk is such an innovative project. Unlike traditional games, the threshold for participation in this game is very low, and users do not need to download any client to play. And on Amazon's Twitch platform, game anchors can also directly interact with users on the platform.
FunPlus was founded in 2011 and is currently one of the top mobile gaming companies in the world. As a global company, FunPlus has more than 2,000 employees from more than 20 countries around the world, and its business covers more than 200 countries and regions around the world, including offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, San Francisco, Tokyo, Stockholm and many other cities. There are offices and R&D centers set up. In the past ten years, FunPlus has produced many different games, and has achieved certain results from brand accumulation to the development of hit games. From 2017 to 2021, FunPlus has topped the annual overseas revenue list of Chinese manufacturers on Data.ai (formerly App Annie) for four consecutive years.
"The core of Pwnk is an interactive game platform based on streaming media, creating a new generation of entertainment experience for young people. Pwnk's new interactive mode is a new gameplay that has never appeared on the market. It not only lowers the game threshold a lot, but also provides It provides players with more immersive experiences." Pu Guannan, vice president of business at FunPlus, founder and CEO of Starscape, and founder of the Pwnk project, told Fun Technology, "We use Pwnk to integrate the two experiences of video streaming and gaming into a It creates a brand new experience. This experience has never appeared on the market before. In terms of game interaction, the current technical capabilities can support thousands of people."
Create a fantasy paradise for players
Pu Guannan pointed out that before the emergence of electronic game consoles, there were already many immersive experiences. For example, Disneyland is a very immersive offline experience. As for online experience, the first-generation experience is World of Warcraft, which can support thousands of people to interact and entertain based on the Internet. FunPlus’s vision is to build itself into the next generation of Disneyland and the next generation of World of Warcraft. The platform it demonstrates is based on cloud native and video streaming, providing a complete interactive, seamless, large-scale immersive cloud gaming experience.
“We hope that Pwnk will be a theme park similar to a fantasy world. In this fantasy park, players can participate in interactive games, and at the same time collect and trade anchor avatars, pet fragments and other items here to create a rich interactive experience. Game experience." Pu Guannan said, "As the core participant, the anchor can interact with the audience by hosting interactive games. This is very similar to the usher in Disneyland, which is to guide everyone to participate in different scenes. The audience is not only You can participate in the game and continuously collect virtual items, some of which can be traded."
We know that most of the games currently on the market do not have actual feedback from real people, and the number of participants is limited. For example, the familiar chicken game can only have 100 players competing in real time at most. The life cycle of the game is also limited. Casual games have Liquidity is generally weak. The emergence of Pwnk can be said to have completely changed this situation.
Powered by Amazon Cloud Technology
Pu Guannan pointed out that Pwnk has broken and consolidated two competitive barriers. One is the technical barrier to real-time communication. With the support of Amazon Cloud Technology, the Pwnk team has overcome the technical difficulties of real-time communication and can achieve frame-synchronized real-time confrontation with thousands of people on the same screen on the server side; the second is creativity and content barriers. For Pwnk to become a life-cycle entertainment platform, the core challenge is to continuously create new games and new ideas to make users truly feel interesting and make more and more players willing to enter and stay on the Pwnk platform.
In the process of breaking down the two major competition barriers, the help of Amazon Cloud Technology played an extremely critical role.
"Building a transnational and cross-regional live broadcast platform that can support global players is a very complicated process. From the push of the video stream, to the encoding and decoding of the video stream, and then pushed to the nearest CDN according to the different locations of the client , there are a lot of steps in the middle. In addition, during the game, players will generate a variety of data, and different types of data are processed in different ways. Only on the cloud platform can it be achieved according to different application needs. Provide different services. It is the cloud that connects players around the world, and it is the cloud that helps companies turn innovation into reality." Liu Lili, Director of Solution Architect of Amazon Cloud Technology's Digital Native Business Department, said, "In addition, for interactive games, Both live streaming and real-time interaction place very high requirements on low latency. And from a technical point of view, user latency in each region of the world is different, which further increases the technical difficulty. Amazon Interactive Video was first tested Service (IVS), the game delay was as much as 15 seconds. Under the joint research of the Amazon Cloud Technology Service team and the Pwnk team, the delay was first reduced to 8 seconds, and finally the delay was reduced to 1 second. Only then did Pwnk It enables frame-synchronized real-time confrontation with thousands of people on the same screen.”
So in the process of building the Pwnk interactive game platform, what kind of assistance did Amazon Cloud Technology provide it? Pu Guannan said there are five main points:
1. Quickly verify business prototypes and continuously iterate and innovate: Exclusive industry solutions and cloud services enable Pwnk to quickly verify business prototypes and technologies. With the help of Amazon IVS, Amazon EKS and other services, it took only 3 months to launch the first product. The strong innovation capabilities support Pwnk's subsequent iteration requirements and meet the needs of 3-4 new games planned to be launched every month.
2. Light operation and maintenance allows more energy to be invested in business research and development: With the help of Amazon cloud technology, Pwnk does not require full-time operation and maintenance personnel, and the CTO can complete the deployment and quickly go online.
3. Cost controllable: If Pwnk is allowed to build its own global live streaming infrastructure, the cost will be unimaginable. Amazon Cloud Technology's global infrastructure provides players with a reliable, low-latency game interactive experience, which is also the basis for the birth of Pwnk. In addition, the use of Amazon Graviton2 instances has also allowed Pwnk to achieve cost savings of more than 10%.
4. Ensure security compliance: Amazon Cloud Technology has obtained extensive compliance certifications around the world, so Pwnk does not need to worry about security compliance issues.
5. Reach more global players more efficiently and extensively: Utilizing Amazon’s global resources, Pwnk has been launched on Amazon’s Twitch platform and has achieved good results.
Cloud services drive rapid innovation and expansion
With the help of Amazon Cloud Technology's deep and wide cloud services, Pwnk has created a cloud-native game with a new interactive model, built a global interactive live broadcast platform, efficiently reached players around the world, and achieved rapid business innovation and expansion.
Pu Guannan revealed that in fact, FunPlus has been using Amazon cloud technology services since its first game, and it has been 12 years so far.
As an overseas company covering more than 200 countries and regions around the world, FunPlus uses Amazon cloud technology's global infrastructure to quickly cover its entertainment products to gamers around the world, and is based on Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Kinesis. The big data platform built by Amazon Cloud Technology data analysis products helps companies gain in-depth insights into project operations around the world.
In addition, with artificial intelligence technology in full swing today, FunPlus is also helping its projects improve their growth capabilities through an intelligent recommendation system built using the Amazon SageMaker machine learning platform. In order to ensure the safe operation of the project, FunPlus also selected security products from Amazon Cloud Technology such as Amazon Shield and Amazon WAF.
In terms of cost control, Amazon Cloud Technology’s performance is also remarkable. The Amazon Graviton2 series instances based on Amazon Cloud Technology's self-developed processors have enabled FunPlus to reduce costs by approximately 10% to 20% compared to the original instances.
"The results of the cooperative practice with Amazon Cloud Technology can be said to be very significant: first, it has achieved low-cost and efficient operations; second, it has achieved rapid launch, iteration, and innovation; third, it has accelerated the international expansion of the business." Pu Guannan said.
