GoldFire Studios Rethinks Social Gaming Using Joyent

A lot has changed since James Simpson, CEO of GoldFire Studios, first started a gaming company ten years ago at age 14. The world of programming, design and business looks and feels differently, especially with the rise of social networks. So when GoldFire Studios took off in 2008, he began looking for innovative ways to shape how people interact with each other through social games.

After launching successful games like PokerRPG and BC Wars, James began developing the GoldFire Network in the fall of 2011 and it just recently launched to the public. The GoldFire Network was built so that games could put community and true social interactions first; you can read more about their mission here.

Specializing in browser-based, real-time multiplayer games means that GoldFire Studios had to choose a high-performance cloud provider and partner. GoldFire Studios had been using dedicated servers, but after meeting some Joyent representatives at the Game Developers Conference in the Fall of 2011, James decided to switch to the Joyent Cloud. The deciding factors? Low latency at scale, transparency and expert support.

“Joyent is the perfect fit for GoldFire Studios because of scalability and performance,” said James. “With the kind of games we’re building, the load varies pretty dramatically throughout the day, and we’re able to use Joyent to scale that up and down in real-time, which is something we hadn’t seen with other cloud providers.”

The move from dedicated servers to Joyent was “extremely smooth” for GoldFire Studios, without any downtime or other issues, thanks to Joyent’s expert and always available support team. And it was cost-effective, too. GoldFire Studios saw their hosting costs lowered by about 60-65%.

“For a while, we ran dedicated servers as extra capacity that were mostly idle. But with Joyent, we can just use the resources we need, which cuts costs quite a bit,” James said.

Delivering the best user experience is critical to the success of GoldFire Studios, and they’re differentiating themselves from other platforms by using cutting edge technologies like HTML5, Node.js and MongoDB to develop their games, including their newest title CasinoRPG.



Post written by Hannah Simon