Limelight Networks, a global leader in digital content delivery, predicts that the amount of data caused by downloads of current top games is up to 30 per cent of an Exabyte. An Exabyte is equal to one billion Gigabytes.

This holiday period, many eagerly anticipated and high profile games were released including Halo 5, Call of Duty: Black Ops III and Fallout 4. Rich graphics, video and audio is driving the size of these game up significantly with new releases ranging from 15 to 54 GB’s. As consoles become more and more powerful and the demands of the gamers for sophisticated graphics increase, game size is expected to continue to grow.

“The high amount of gaming downloads at Christmas results in heavy internet traffic,” said Anne Blanchard, senior product marketing manager at Limelight. “As more and more gamers get games online, a huge amount of game software needs to be delivered, particularly at peak purchase times such as the weeks leading up to Christmas and between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Without the right game delivery infrastructure, downloads will take a long time or be interrupted and the gamers will become frustrated instead of enjoying their new games during the holidays.”

As a BITKOM study shows, gamers expect fast downloads and short loading times from their games.

“For the game providers and distribution platforms, the challenge is – especially at times of peak usage around the holidays – to deliver large amounts of data to gamers quickly and without interruptions. Rather than building and maintaining their own infrastructure to deliver large data volumes, game providers and distribution platforms can easily and efficiently implement a content delivery network,” said Jason Thibeault, Technical Evangelist at Limelight.

The Limelight Orchestrate Solution for Gaming addresses precisely the challenges that result from the provision and delivery of games with high sales numbers and large amounts of data. The solution enables game providers to reach their global audience quickly, reliably, safely and without interruption. The data is stored right on the edge of the global Limelight network, which leads to a low latency, no matter if there is a cache hit or cache miss. Limelight’s Orchestrate solution for gaming also allows the easy management of large game files, updates, DLC´s (Downloadable Content), user-generated content (UCG) as well as the deployment of videos on different devices.

Categories: Articles, Games