Using CDNetworks to Host Your Game’s Content…

Ken of CD Networks discusses their content delivery network

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/cdnetworks-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]MTq_EwMGg8Y[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Ken: My name is Ken DeGrande. I’m the Director of Sales for the Americas for CD Networks.

Interviewer: What is CD Networks about?

Ken: CD Networks is a content delivery network. So, essentially what we are is we’re an Internet distribution company, and we deliver games online for some of the biggest names in the world; Disney, Flame [?] and a lot of others, Perfect World, Nexon, et cetera.

Essentially what we do is we bring the gaming content closer to the end users, the players of the game, so that they can have a better gaming experience. Essentially what that means is instead of the game coming out of the area where the developer is located, we actually pull it into our network and distribute it across all of our data centers around the world. There’s about 90 of them. And that way if somebody from Japan wants to play a game but the company’s based in Los Angeles, we actually serve the data from Japan. That could be for game playing, for message boards, the actual web page itself, anything that the game company is delivering over the Internet, including patches and updates and things like that.

Interviewer: So, you mentioned that in your literature it says social gaming solutions so a lot of smaller game developers are doing social gaming. What is the use then of this in social gaming? I know you talked about distributing content. The other question is: if someone makes a change, does it take quite a while for it actually to get updated on the rest of the network?

Ken: No, actually it’s really a caching network is what it is. Because there is a lot of change, especially with the social gaming environment, what we do is we detect the change or when a customer requests new data, the cache will go back to the end users infrastructure and we’ll grab it and we’ll repopulate the caches based on that request.

So, if somebody in Seattle wanted that content, for instance and it was new content, we would go back and retrieve it. Then everybody else in that region who wanted that new content would automatically be served that. The other thing is we have purging tools so the developer, the first one in the infrastructure, will actually purge out all the old content and then we would always serve up the new content after that.

Interviewer: Do you have any interesting stats on results using CD Networks versus something else in terms of either speed, loading time or something else?

Ken: Oh absolutely. In fact, you’re going to see exponential delivery, especially overseas but even in America. You’re looking at–we just did a test versus a regular high key provider within the United States. I won’t say the name of the provider, but it is a good one. And this is for a gaming company, actually a social gaming company, and they saw 8x improvement so 800 percent improvement just in speed.

I think one of the other benefits you can get is you really get a lot of visibility into where your end users are, what files are the most popular files that are being downloaded and what reasons. So, you really get a lot of reporting analytics around your data; how many users log on, from what Geos, like I said, top domains, patches. You can see time of day stats, how much they’re using et cetera. And we do this in a very simple and easy to read user [?].

Interviewer: Do developers have to use anything special in their games or code to actually make all this feature or how does that work?

Ken: No, not at all. In fact, we generally can get a client turned up and delivering over the network literally within an hour. We actually have self-provisioning tools built in where it’s really easy to set up, and you can actually start delivering via the new domain or a new game or a new download literally within a half an hour in Real Time. You set it up. You don’t have to call in R&I. It’s all automatic.

Interviewer: How is this better or different than some of the services that Amazon offers? You know, they have data centers in multiple parts of the world.

Ken: I’m sorry. Repeat the question.

Interviewer: How is this better or different than, say, some of the other client services that are offered by Amazon?

Ken: Sure. Well, Amazon’s got a much smaller type of footprint. We’re actually the second largest network footprint across the globe. We’ve got about 22 data centers in North America. We just expanded to South America. There’s only two of us who do that. We’ve got a very large presence in Europe, including Eastern Europe. We’re in the Middle East and we’re in Asia. We’re actually the number one provider. We even deliver within mainland China. We’re the only CDN company that does that with operations in the U. S.

So, we’ve got a really nice global footprint. We offer a full suite of CD end services. Just outside of cache and download, we offer streaming services. We just released a new product for delivering dynamic content. We can actually deliver dynamic content or actually speed up applications over the web as well which is a value that really only a couple of us do. Combine that with a really nice interface and actually really a class friendly price model, I think we’re a really nice, best of breed, full service CDN that’s truly global.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the pricing model then, and how do small developers get started? What’s the cost and what can they expect in terms of being able to afford it?

Ken: Sure. So, the pricing model is based on two different types. We generally price based on the 95th percentile model which is the same as an IP transit provider would do it. We’ll reprice for GB delivered or gigabyte delivered. You want to be careful which one you select because if you have huge spikes at the beginning of the month and you’re in the 95 percentile model your 95th percentile grab will stay at that level for the rest of the month and you get charged for all that [?].

So, for those types of customers we recommend going with the gigabytes transfer, and then for somebody without such a spiky usage model then we recommend going with the 95th percentile. You get a little more bang for your buck. We like to be a good partner when recommending and really look at people’s traffic patterns, you know, RPS–requests per second–is what that is and really give the best type pricing model for them.

In terms of entry fees and stuff like that, IP is really based on economy as a scale, so the price point goes down based on the larger amount you’re going to use. But it’s also different on a regional basis. So, depending on where you’re going to serve across the globe, the price point can change a little bit. What we try and do is flatten that out for our customers and really open up all their pops for one price point.

Interviewer: Where can developers get started about finding out more information for using your service?

Ken: Well, our website is a great place. That’s at www.CDNetworks.com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.