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How we built it: Next Games global online gaming platform on Azure

Today on Microsoft Mechanics, we are joined by the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Finnish mobile gaming company Next Games, Kalle Hiitola, for the next episode of "How we built it."

Today on Microsoft Mechanics, we are joined by the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Finnish mobile gaming company Next Games, Kalle Hiitola, for the next episode of “How we built it.”

Next Games has built a successful global connected gaming platform on Azure with users spanning 166 countries and growing.

Their popular Walking Dead No Man's Land game is aligned to the popular Walking Dead TV series. The game releases a rapid cadence of new chapters and characters to compliment the release of each new episode.

Built for Cloud

Their Cloud-native approach comprises carefully crafted loosely-coupled core back end services for their Driller TM gaming platform which gives them the flexibility to change every aspect of the mobile games running on their platform on the fly.

These run on a robust infrastructure of Azure services to handle everything from player compute, gaming content updates, all gaming interactions such as in-app purchases, the storing of player states, metadata such as scores, gaming analytics to manage the in-game experience and notifications.

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Their Azure-based architecture includes load balancing to support simultaneous gaming sessions and compute instances are designed to be stateless and scale out infinitely based on demand.

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Solutions for Gamer Fraud and Content Delivery

Two important areas of innovation include gamer fraud protection and dynamic content delivery.

As Kalle explains, the same logic is run on the client and server enabling fast detection and prevention of fraud if the client tries to write back an invalid value based on the last known player state.

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Dynamic content delivery is made possible by publishing video game trailers to Azure Media Services and new gaming content is published via their core gaming services triggering notifications to players.

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Join us for the Next Games AMA

To learn more about Next Games online gaming platform on Azure, please check out today's episode.

The Next Games team with Kalle Hiitola, will also be joining our AMA session on the Microsoft Technical Community, July 11th at 9am PDT at https://aka.ms/how-we-built-it-NextGames