The live tournament game concept has a unique scale challenge. As such, the business needed a platform for its games that could scale up and down flexibly in line with the huge bursts of demand that a tournament requires. Its choice of Microsoft Azure as the platform for its games development and play has also helped to deliver further efficiencies for the business. The team’s use of Microsoft Azure’s native tooling helps to ensure tight integration of technologies while streamlining work.
Live Tech Games is pioneering a new wave of mobile entertainment through live gaming experiences. The London-based business was founded in 2019 by Nathan Moore and Samuel Worsley.
By taking simple, familiar games and using mobile technology to create fun, interactive events, it offers live tournament play experiences on a national or local scale. It is, Nathan Moore explains, “about building experiences on your mobile phone that you genuinely look forward to being a part of.”
A unique scalability challenge
The live tournament game concept has a unique scale challenge, as Live Tech Games Chief Architect John Kattenhorn explains, “when you have a tournament at a predescribed time all of those people arrive at that time and that’s quite unique for computing in general.”
As such, the business needed a platform for its games that could scale up and down flexibly in line with the huge bursts of demand that a tournament requires. “Microsoft Azure was for sure the right decision because no other platform could handle that concurrency of users,” says Co-founder Samuel Worsley.
Managing the business with efficiency
The Live Tech Games team now has tight control over its use of cloud compute resources, so it is easier to manage the business efficiently.
Its choice of Microsoft Azure as the platform for its games development and play has also helped to deliver further efficiencies for the business. The team’s use of Microsoft Azure’s native tooling helps to ensure tight integration of technologies while streamlining work. John Kattenhorn explains, “The combination of Azure .NET and Project Orleans has meant they all fit together really tightly, so we didn’t have to fight the technologies and we could focus on what matters: game play and the game experience.”
Scaling up for the future
Live Tech Games are loved by players across the UK and are now being utilised by corporate businesses to engage with their staff and customers and by entertainment venues to create more interactive customer experiences. This year, ITV has invested in the business and the team is excited about working on interactive games to complement its programming.
“Right now, our platform is able to handle tens of thousands of users,” says Samuel Worsley, “in the future, we want to take that to hundreds of thousands of users and, soon, millions. And we’re going to do that through the power of Microsoft Azure”
“We want to take our platform to millions of users. And we’re going to do that through the power of Microsoft Azure.”
Samuel Worsley, Co-founder, Live Tech Games
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