For E3, Infinitely Virtual Provides Technological Counsel for When Indie Games Go Viral

What can be a blessing and a curse for Indie Game Developers?

Their game going viral. It's a blessing simply because it's promised, unexpected revenue, and developers' dreams are being fulfilled. But there is also the curse of being unprepared, technology-wise, for a game gaining too much popularity.

A game's popularity can spike overnight to thousands or even millions of players, and indie developers may not have the technology to properly support the weight of said popularity.

Quoting Adam Stern, founder and CEO of leading cloud-hosting provider Infinitely Virtual:

"Indie game developers rightly fret about hitting the wall - about lacking the infrastructure to properly support a wildly popular new title. Without question, smaller game developers building massive multiplayer games need infrastructure and often have to ramp up quickly. They can't spend much in advance, since they need to marshal their resources for the title itself."

So in response and in time for E3, Stern has offered five pointers to begin with:

"1. Face reality but prepare optimistically. Embrace Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - and do it early. Puns aside, rapid scalability is the name of the game. If your title catches on, you'll never to add substantial horsepower overnight. IaaS enables you to start small but quickly increase computer power with essentially no upfront costs. You can literally boost your capabilities within days or even hours.

2. Pay only for what you use. Whether you need to expand storage, compute power, security protocols, whatever - the pay-as-you-go rental model enables you to calibrate your growth and keep your focus on product development and delivery.

3. Have your specs in a row. Just as you don't want to underestimate your needs, neither do you want or need to get in too deep, too fast. Itemize your anticipated requirements: high speed storage? 10 gigabit connectivity? Fast interfaces between servers? What else?

4. Get personal. find a provider who answers the phone (literally) and get to know your name. Do business with an organization as steeped in the architecture as you are in game design. Will Amazon offer you an engineering team?

5. Eschew hardware. Keep your focus on using and consuming, not buying. You won't merely be avoiding the money pit of depreciating iron, you'll be sparing yourself the need to add headcount in IT. And you'll still have computer power in reserve."

Finally, he adds, "This is how you play to win."

So, while you prepare for E3, indie devs, you should definitely keep Stern's counsel in mind, just in case.