As the gaming industry transitions into a market of existing players, the focus shifts towards the development of high-quality games, necessitating game developers and manufacturers to continuously enhance their R&D and operational capabilities. In this industry context, both the initiation and development stages of new games, as well as the operational stages of existing games, face increasing challenges.
Recently, Huawei’s Game Developer Salon, specifically the Petal Gaming Services (PGS) session, was held in Chengdu. Huawei Game Center introduced PGS content and plans covering the entire lifecycle from game initiation, development, testing, distribution, to operation, and invited game manufacturers such as Zhongyou, YiJu Internet, and Hero Games to share their experiences and effects of using industry benchmarking, online multiplayer combat, and performance optimization services.Accurately anchoring the game direction to reduce trial and error costs, the initiation service relies on Huawei Game Center’s traffic, channel operation data, and underlying technical capabilities to provide industry benchmarking services such as game industry indices, game industry portraits, game industry insights, and game material indices. It trains AI models to estimate the trends of game lifecycle indicators, helping developers enhance certainty during the initiation phase, reduce trial and error costs, and increase the success rate of games.
Combining the initiation service, the distribution producer of Zhongyou’s ‘Zhenhun Street: Born to be King’ shared early experiences of the game’s initiation: based on industry portraits and insights, flexibly combining different tags such as ‘Zhenhun’ IP, ARPG/card game users, and themes of the Three Kingdoms/fantasy, using data models to assess and determine the player base, helping the product establish entry points and core gameplay forms more quickly. By comparing materials of competitive and benchmark games, and industry data of similar games, the feasibility and opportunities of the product were determined, providing data references for estimating project ROI.
Currently, the initiation service provides more than 100 game manufacturers and developers with industry reference indicators such as game distribution, user retention, and user payment. More industry benchmarking services will be opened this year, offering developers more industry insights and guidance. Development services cover the entire process of developing competitive games, with the aim of helping developers complete higher-quality competitive gameplay development more efficiently. PGS provides developers with full-process services from combat to communication and sharing, including online multiplayer combat, game multimedia, and embedded community services, helping developers quickly build complete PVP combat scenarios.
Online battles are at the core of the battle process. Specifically, online battle services include services such as player matching and frame synchronization. In terms of efficiency improvement, compared to building a player matching scene from scratch independently, developers only need to access the service SDK for immediate use and efficient development. In terms of high-quality construction, under the key technologies of dual-network aggregation capability, RTN (premium backbone network), and self-developed protocol algorithms, the online battle service achieves zero packet loss and frame transmission delay lower than 110ms, reaching the leading level in the industry. As of now, more than 200 games have accessed the PGS online battle service and achieved remarkable results, such as ‘Talking Tom Gold Run’ with daily battles exceeding hundreds of thousands of times and ‘Stickman War’ that supports full-platform matching. The developer of ‘Stickman War’ shares: ‘Compared to independent research and development, after accessing the SDK, the research and development investment in realizing the battle gameplay process is saved by more than 70%. After the function is launched, it brings users a stable and low-latency game experience, and user retention is increased by nearly 20%.’ Communication between players is essential during battles. Multimedia services cover services such as real-time voice and content risk control. The former can achieve high-quality calls with ultra-low latency of less than 200ms in game scenarios such as real-time battles, Werewolf Kill, and command in hundred-player team battles. The latter improves the accuracy and efficiency of content review for player communication through AI algorithms, achieving an average daily review of 10 million pieces of content and a bad advertising interception rate of 99%, creating a pure game environment for users. This salon also announced the launch of the embedded community function. Developers can add community or forum entrances within the game. Users can search and browse strategy posts for dungeon exploration and like and comment on activity posts to participate in welfare activities without leaving the game. This service helps developers create a more immersive game experience. On the one hand, it increases user retention time. On the other hand, it increases activity exposure and user reach. Performance optimization services help improve the gaming experience. The newly added super-resolution service allows developers to optimize performance from dimensions such as frame rate, power consumption, and picture quality during the game development process to enhance the user experience. In this regard, the Huawei Game Center respectively showcases the frame insertion, binary library optimization, and super-resolution technologies of the PGS performance optimization service. The frame insertion technology enables stable operation of games with low power consumption and high frame rate through intelligent frame insertion, reducing CPU and DDR. The original painting quality of ‘Diablo: Immortal’ premiered on the Mate 50 series achieves an 8% reduction in power consumption. Binary library optimization is applicable to Android and HarmonyOS system environments. It is the industry’s unique technology that significantly reduces the running load of the main thread so library through compiler optimization technology to reduce CPU. The project ‘Project Nebula’ that rapidly iterates and innovates in the shooting track uses this tool to help the game improve performance on the CPU side and achieve power consumption reduction.
Super resolution technology is a newly launched performance optimization service of PGS this year. It enables games to be rendered based on a low-resolution pipeline and then upsampled to high resolution through the super resolution interface, thereby reducing power consumption and improving rendering quality.
At present, it can provide GPU/AI single-frame super resolution and AI multi-frame super resolution technologies for developers. The former is a high-performance solution for GPU and GPU+NPU with strong versatility. The latter needs to combine data such as motion vector and jitter to achieve higher magnification super resolution and greater profit space. In addition, the salon also introduced the services of PGS in the distribution and operation stage, providing solutions for game overseas expansion and cloud gaming. Under the general trend of game overseas expansion, PGS provides services such as price management, test appointment traffic services and localized operation for developers based on three dimensions of global management, user growth and user retention, helping games gain volume growth overseas. In terms of cloud gaming, to meet the trend of refined game products and cross-industry upgrading of the industry, Huawei Cloud reshapes efficiency through dimensions such as cloud-assisted terminals, game on cloud and game security services, and creates high-quality games together with game developers to achieve business growth. Currently, the game market has entered a refined stage of product innovation and long-term operation. Huawei Game Center provides petal game developer services covering the entire life cycle of game project initiation – development – testing – distribution – operation for developers. It hopes to empower developers through technology, become a value support point for game research and development and creation, help developers conduct efficient research and development, promote conversion and improve retention, and create high-quality games and build an HMS game ecosystem together with game developers. If you want to know more detailed PGS content, please go to the original text>>>
