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July 24, 2023

Live Tech Games massively scales its gaming platform with Microsoft Azure during the FIFA World Cup

Live Tech Games is on a mission to create unique, massively multiplayer mobile gaming experiences that people genuinely want to be a part of. To achieve this, Live Tech Games runs live social tournament games. At set times (for example, 7 PM each evening), a push notification announces the game is starting, and users play live against each other at that moment. Live Tech Games also runs games that are televised live in event halls and pubs after live shows and sporting events to help draw in large audiences from across the United Kingdom. In September 2022, Live Tech Games began working on Knockout, a new football trivia game in which players go head-to-head in three rounds televised at the end of each match of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

Live Tech Games

The first match of the World Cup was coming up in November, and Live Tech Games needed support to develop the game in time for the first match and scale its gaming platform for massive amounts of concurrent users (CCUs). Having previously struggled to scale past 10,000 CCUs, it now needed to support more than 500,000 CCUs. To meet these challenges, Live Tech Games turned to Azure. Over the last few years, Live Tech Games has launched several enormously successful games using the Azure platform, but it faced a unique challenge when preparing for this larger audience. With help from the Azure team, Live Tech Games was able to use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Microsoft Orleans, and Azure SignalR Service to scale to meet high influxes of demand during the 2022 World Cup.

“During the 2022 FIFA World Cup, in partnership with ITV, we ran over 30 live tournament games with thousands of players joining and playing against each other all at once—and thanks to Azure, everything ran perfectly.”

Samuel Worsley, Cofounder and Co-CEO, Live Tech Games

Accelerating success with FastTrack for Azure and Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub

Through the FastTrack for Azure program and Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, cloud-born companies can accelerate their ability to innovate. Both played a pivotal role in Live Tech Games’ success. The FastTrack for Azure gaming team provided personalized guidance and best practices to optimize the gaming infrastructure and ensure a smooth transition to the Azure platform. With FastTrack for Azure for gaming—a program specifically designed to empower game developers and publishers to accelerate their cloud journeys—Live Tech Games efficiently designed and deployed a highly scalable architecture capable of handling the massive influx of users during the World Cup. And by distributing the load across multiple regions using the power of Azure's datacenters, the company ensured near-zero latency for players across the entire United Kingdom.

The Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub also played a major role in helping Live Tech Games scale its operations. The program provided USD150,000 of Azure credits to help the company get started. These credits were instrumental in helping Live Tech Games scale its platform and ensured the company stayed with Azure, even during highly competitive external circumstances.  

At the beginning of its Azure journey, Live Tech Games tested several different services in an attempt to reach the necessary level of CCUs. The question was never if Azure could handle these types of workloads—it was how Azure could handle these types of workloads. Enter Microsoft Orleans, an incredibly powerful solution that enabled the scalability for live games that Live Tech Games dreamed of. Two of the company’s games—WordSurge and KnockOut—even reached the top of the app charts during the World Cup (Figure 1).

“I look forward to KnockOut every day after the football match, and it’s so much fun. All the different types of questions are very creative, and hopefully one day I’ll win the money,” says one KnockOut reviewer. 

Another reviewer excitedly shares, “Love this concept. [KnockOut] has helped bring the whole family together this World Cup.”

Enabling scalability and fault tolerance with Microsoft Orleans 

Arguably one of the most important technologies that contributed to Live Tech Games’ ability to scale, Orleans is an open-source cross-platform framework for building robust, scalable distributed applications. Orleans enabled Live Tech Games to implement a highly scalable, fault-tolerant back-end system that could handle the massive CCU load. Even when reaching hundreds of thousands of CCUs, latency was never an issue, as Live Tech Games never consumed more than 60 percent of its total CPU or memory availability. This was largely due to how well the solution was architected and the choice of Azure services, as only a handful of servers were needed to achieve this scale. “We were the pioneers of using Microsoft Orleans as a back-end system for gaming. We tried many other solutions, but Microsoft Orleans was the only solution that came close to delivering the near-zero latency we were looking for,” says Haris Hercegovac, Head of Server Engineering at Live Tech Games.

Using the actor-based model, Orleans allowed Live Tech Games to distribute the workload across just a few containers, making it easier to scale horizontally. This distributed approach ensured that, even with a significant increase in users during the World Cup, the system remained responsive and maintained a high level of performance. Additionally, Orleans offers built-in fault-tolerance capabilities, ensuring any potential failures or crashes wouldn’t disrupt the gaming experience for players. Live Tech Games used Azure Container Instances to simulate user activity for its load and stress tests and used Azure Load Testing to test APIs for data retrieval.

Communicating in real time and at scale using Azure SignalR Service and Azure Service Bus

Live Tech Games also used SignalR Service as a backbone of its platform to enable real-time communication between players, delivering a dynamic and immersive gaming experience. SignalR handles massive amounts of simultaneous connections, which made it an ideal choice for Live Tech Games during the World Cup, where hundreds of thousands of players were actively engaged in seamless real-time interactions. Whether it was leaderboards or live match updates, SignalR facilitated instantaneous and reliable data transfer, enhancing the overall gaming experience. “Azure SignalR Service helped us handle hundreds of thousands of signals in a very simplistic manner. Scaling was as easy as two clicks in our system, and it was a very cost-effective service, even when handling the workloads we were working with,” says Hercegovac.

To address high load and keep gameplay running smoothly, Live Tech Games decided to use a microservice architecture to isolate and efficiently manage different parts of its system. Azure Service Bus played a crucial role in facilitating seamless communication between these services, helping to establish a messaging system that ensured reliable and efficient communication among the various components. The enhanced coordination among the services contributes greatly to an overall improved gaming experience.

Orchestrating containerized workloads with AKS

To further enhance scalability, Live Tech Games integrated AKS into its infrastructure. AKS provided a managed Kubernetes environment that simplified the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. 

By containerizing its gaming services and using AKS, Live Tech Games gained the ability to dynamically scale its resources based on demand. AKS automatically orchestrated the deployment and scaling of containers, ensuring optimal resource utilization during peak usage periods—like after 2022 World Cup matches. This flexibility allowed Live Tech Games to efficiently handle the massive influx of CCUs without compromising performance or user experience. With AKS, Live Tech Games also benefited from features like automatic load balancing and self-healing capabilities, which ensured that gaming services remained highly available and resilient to failures and provided a seamless experience to players, even in the face of unpredictable spikes in user traffic. What made AKS especially valuable to Live Tech Games was that all of these features were easy to use and deploy. “Beyond the amazing capabilities of AKS, we were really impressed with the out-of-the-box security capabilities enabling us to protect data with ease. We’ve also had no downtime when using AKS—it’s been incredible,” says Haris Hercegovac.

Planning for what’s next

Live Tech Games is only just getting started. With demanding plans on the horizon, the company is bolstering its Azure-based platform. Its live gaming experiences will soon be able to support millions of CCUs. Check back in a few months from now to learn how we get there.

Find out more about Live Tech Games through LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Please note: the FastTrack for Azure program has been discontinued since publication of this customer story. 

“We were the pioneers of using Microsoft Orleans as a back-end system for gaming. We tried many other solutions, but Microsoft Orleans was the only solution that came close to delivering the near-zero latency we were looking for.”

Haris Hercegovac, Head of Server Engineering, Live Tech Games

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