As with many forms of media, the future of gaming is quickly migrating into the cloud. Very shortly, the industry has the potential to move past the idea of a console and into a media field where games can be purchased online and streamed directly to a customer. This could change the purchase model for software dramatically and offer games on a subscription basis. Those willing to venture into this new territory could earn a large percentage of the market.

Toronto-based TransGaming is a pioneer of streaming game technology and maintains strategic partnerships with some of the biggest developers/publishers in the space. According to the company’s website, TransGaming maintains relationships with, “EA, Ubisoft, Sony Online Entertainment, LEGO, NCSoft, CCP, and Rockstar just to name a few.”

The company also has strong relationships with hardware manufacturers including Apple, Intel, AMD (News - Alert) and Nvidia. Trangaming's goal is to bring console style games to network connected TVs and devices offering a live gaming experience without the need for expensive hardware.

Recently, TransGaming’s move to bring its hosted GameTree platform to a new market required the company to test network scenarios that could become an issue. The company needed to test parameters regarding the network, including validation that it would be able handle peak loads before everything went live. It also needed to account for any connections issues not seen during regular testing, identify application performance bottlenecks and ensure failsafes worked correctly during peak traffic times.

Apica LoadTest was selected because of its ability to simulate actual set-top box user scenarios in complex scripts, mimicking the actual launch of TransGaming’s platform rather theorizing scenarios.  Apica has the ability to drive load from multiple geographies, particularly in Europe where TransGaming’s launch was going to take place.

According to the white paper, “Apica’s engineering teams worked closely with RightScale in order to collect and analyze performance data in real-time. Apica was able to drive extremely aggressive spike loads and they were able to provide real-time graphs and analysis that the RightScale and TransGaming teams used to tune and triage the cloud systems on the fly."

“Business critical peak performance issues is our customer base, they want validation that the cloud space works and we’ve set up our monitoring and load testing services to accomplish that,” said CEO Sven Hammar in an interview with TMC (News - Alert) at Cloud Connect.

After only three weeks of testing with Apica, TransGaming saw a 400 percent increase in concurrency and performance. Apica’s ability to determine exactly what the company needed in of its network was essential to the enjoyment of the game platform in European markets. TransGaming’s platform will be available this spring.