Performance Testing for Online Games and Game Servers

Online gaming is booming, and the demand for online games will persist in the coming years. The global gaming market was valued at USD 173.70 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 314.40 billion by 2026. One of the important growth factors is, perhaps, the pandemic. Multiple lockdowns made people stay home and turn to game platforms to pass the time. However, it also created unexpected load growth on gaming servers worldwide.

In such circumstances, the QA sector of load testing for online games is increasing, too. In this article, we will outline what load testing is in games, why it is an absolute must to perform performance tests on games regularly, what types of performance tests are applicable in the online game dev industry, and what place performance testing holds in the game project lifecycle.

Check our latest case, “Performance Testing for Game Development: Process Automation”

QA in Game Dev: an Absolute Must

Game testing is one of the most important game development processes. It helps you decide whether your gaming application is ready for launch, locates bottlenecks and errors, helps evaluate coherence and completeness, etc. As for load testing in particular, even such huge developers as Blizzard, Valve, Grinding Gear Games, Amazon Game Studios, and many other companies specializing in massive online games often are challenged by server load problems, although they have huge budgets to spend on servers and preliminary testing.

Gamers, however, are never patient. Rather, they are passionate people spoiled by other mobile and desktop applications’ response time. If gamers have a bad experience with the game, they usually complain about it on Reddit or Twitter the minute it crashes. This also causes collateral damage to the developers’ reputations and severe financial losses. Due to the high likelihood that the player will abandon the game after encountering serious problems, the studio must be 100% sure that all servers and services are working great for all locations 24/7.

Incorporating load testing into development routines is even more important for smaller market players and independent game dev studios since they don’t have any reputational capacity to lose yet.

Games testing in the project lifecycle

An online game project lifecycle starts with an idea. Pre-production and production usually require the participation of producers, artists, and engineers. When artists and engineers have executed every base component, the production team will then manage to optimize all the parts of the game to drive it to run properly on the hardware it is being produced for. That’s where post-production starts, and a testing team should be involved, too. The process is reiterated after they test the first game adaptation and return it to designers and/or developers.

Every new release or feature requires testing, too. So, to cut a long story short, testing of online games in the lifecycle of the project should be positioned like this:

Specifics of Game Servers Testing

Top online games should accept players from different countries. Most starting-up game studios are also striving to enter the global market to return their investment. Hence, it is vitally important for the studio to use the best performance and load testing solutions to tune the servers for optimal performance, preferably using random IP addresses from around the world, to get a realistic assessment of the game’s performance, and to prepare the project for any potential difficulties.

Web traffic in online gaming works in a rather special way. If you use Google or YouTube today, then within your session, you will reconnect to dozens of servers around the world, which are responsible for different services in the infrastructure of these huge portals. Not to mention, 122 million people visit YouTube every day. It happens absolutely invisibly for the user due to load balancers that switch traffic between different servers, so one doesn’t need to worry about the persistence of the connection between them and a specific server.

But that’s not how game servers work. In an online game, the player must be online from the beginning to the end of the session. If you try to disconnect the connection, the game will be lost. Load balancers cannot be used to redistribute load across multiple servers. And, unlike in web traffic, using clusters in game hosting is impossible. Therefore, it is important to load test the servers to make sure they can run smoothly throughout the game session or match.

Types of Game Testing

The most typical performance tests for mobile games are general tests that determine how the game performs in terms of responsiveness, stability, and refresh rate under certain workloads or user interaction patterns. However, there are dozens of ways to check soft performance, and almost all of them are applicable to online game testing. Read more in our article web application performance testing tips.

Main Risks in Game Testing

There are multiple reasons why gaming applications might fail. Firstly, gaming applications are complex; they are expensive and lengthy, and it is humanly impossible to test every possible permutation and combination (Check our article on “Android apps performance and load testing”). Secondly, if the game doesn’t create a compelling experience for the user, i.e., if it’s not fun and addictive, there’s a huge chance of project failure. Even non-technical aspects, such as music, unique storyline, characters, competitiveness, and aesthetics, play a huge role in its success.

Meanwhile, not every company has the budget for an extensive testing team, best load testing tools, and testing devices, which is a shame. The final decision is still to be made by the users: visual design, gaming experience, ease of use, and control have to appeal to the target audience.

The Results

Load testing techniques allow game developers to anticipate the future and prepare for scaling challenges in advance. These carefully planned and data-driven processes ensure your game doesn’t crash or freeze during an online match, leaving your players from all over the world unsatisfied. For developers looking to further enhance performance, using a gRPC load testing tool can help optimize high-performance API architectures, ensuring smooth gameplay even under heavy loads. If you would like to learn more about how to host your game on decentralized servers or in the cloud or tested by thousands of virtual players, contact us to get started!