Google and Ubisoft have a new project intended to improve the performance of fast-paced, online multi-player video games.
The search giant said Tuesday that it teamed with Ubisoft—the publisher of popular video games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry—to create a gaming developer framework intended for coders that work on online video games.
The project is called Agones, which is Greek for “contest” or “gathering,” and it will be available in open-source, meaning developers can use it for free and also contribute to the underlying technology.
Google (GOOG) pitches Agones as a more cutting-edge way for developers to build multi-player games that don’t crash or stutter when thousands of video gamers play at the same time.
Each time people want to play their favorite first-person shooter or other computer resource-heavy online video game with others, the underlying infrastructure that powers the online video game must create a special gaming server that hosts the players. The Agones framework was designed to more efficiently distribute the computing resources necessary to support each online gaming match, thus reducing the complexity of creating each special server while helping coders better track how the computing resources are being used.
“Our goal is to continually find new ways to provide the highest-quality, most seamless services to our players so that they can focus on their games,” said Ubisoft development director of the online technology Carl Dionne in a statement. “Agones helps by providing us with the flexibility to run dedicated game servers in optimal datacenters, and by giving our teams more control over the resources they need.”
The new Agones framework is noteworthy considering other big cloud computing companies like Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) also offer their own versions. These cloud computing businesses offer gaming developer tools as a way to lure more customers to build video games on top of their respective cloud computing services.
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Online video games require a lot of computing resources to operate, which means these cloud companies could potentially earn a lot of money the more developers and gaming publishers use each company’s respective cloud gaming tools.
The Agones framework is also built using Google’s open-source Kubernetes management service, which the search giant has been heavily pushing to developers as a way to build complex apps that requires computing resources from multiple data centers.
Google is hoping that coders’ increased familiarity with the Kubernetes developer software will make them more likely to try the Agones service.
