Adding multiplayer elements to your game is one way to increase engagement, retention and, hopefully, monetisation.

But while the asynchronous With Friends'-style provides the simplest option, score comparisons don't drive visceral competition like real-time head-to-head play.

Enabling developers to tap into this, even for twitch games that demand low latency, is the goal of Australian technology outfit Scalify.

It uses a distributed P2P architecture, using a patented multiple ring topology, enabling play across iOS, Android, PC and Mac.

Sounds complex? We asked CEO Steve Telburn to explain.

Pocket Gamer: Can you provide us with some background to Scalify? What's this sort of company doing based in Australia?

Steve Telburn: Funnily enough, the concept was born out of frustration with playing MMOs from Australia. Even if we were playing against others in Australia, the latency was unbearable because the servers were in the US.

My co-founder Santosh Kulkarni had a strong background in building peer-to-peer and streaming networks so he knew there had to be a better way.

He then led a four-year research project at NICTA, Australia's largest ICT R&D lab, to develop a fundamentally different architecture for real-time multiplayer gaming that provided much better performance and scalability.

Once the technology was proven we spun-out a new company, Scalify, and raised venture capital last year.

What technology do you offer?

We launched with Badumna Network Suite, a product targeted at larger publishers building complex MMOs.

As well as improving game performance, Badumna enables them to create new game designs, such as 'unsharded' worlds where all players join one world, rather than being forced to join a separate servers where they are isolated from their friends.

In 2012, a lot of developers told us they wanted to create real-time multiplayer games for mobile devices. MOBAs and other synchronous games have incredible metrics for engagement and monetisation, so it is easy to see the attraction for developers.

But it is incredibly hard to get the back-end right, and companies admit it costs thee times as much, and takes five times as long, when compared to building an asynchronous game.

Often the performance of the game is not great either. Most mobile developers do not have any networking experience, so it is even harder for them.

So we created our Badumna Cloud product for those teams. Everything is automated, so a typical developer can build a demo multiplayer game in 10 minutes, without writing any networking code.

It uses the same underlying P2P architecture, so the latency will be lower than if they were using a traditional client-server solution. It helps them keep their players happy and coming back for more.

Cloud is a hot technology, but how do you compete with big players like Amazon and Microsoft?

Our solution is complementary to solutions like Amazon Web Services and Azure and in many ways they are ideal partners - we use Amazon as part of our solution.

A cloud solution for low-latency gaming requires much more than just server capacity. The middleware layer looks after functions such as finding other players, connecting them together and synchronising the game-state across all the players.

A managed P2P network - sounds funky but risky. What's the advantage and how do you deal with the risk, for example inherently unreliability P2P connections?

Our implementation isn't risky at all, and with our patented multiple ring topology we think it is lower risk than traditional client-server.

The key part of the technology we developed is about making P2P reliable for real-time traffic. We developed a unique multiple ring architecture that uses a variety of techniques to ensure performance across different types of network connections and devices. So a player on a 3G network is treated differently to a player on a fixed network.

Also, it is not an all-or-nothing approach. Developers can decide which functions are performed on the P2P network and which functions are done client-server. The solution can be blended to suit the developer's needs.

For instance in high security situations like MMOs, the 'cheating sensitive' portions of the game can be implemented as client-server while the rest runs P2P. The key advantages of using P2P connections is improved performance - lower latency - and scalability and therefore a better game experience for players.

I can understand that using a P2P configuration is cheap but what impact does it have for my game design?

The solution gives game designers much more freedom to create. They can design synchronous multiplayer games that ordinarily would be either impossible, or have poor performance and be very expensive to develop and operate.

For example, synchronous mobile MMOs, or MMOs where all players interact in one world rather than being isolated on lots of separate servers, so no shards if you don't want them.

Looking at the applications currently using Badumna, they don't seem to be pushing fast dense gameplay, so why would I trust you for my mobile FPS or MOBA game that's going to be massive?

Badumna was actually designed with fast-dense gameplay in mind, and this is where the performance and scalability advantages are strongest.

We only launched the Cloud service for mobile developers a couple of months ago, so the games are still in the works.

Here's an example of demo third-person shooter game using Badumna. This is a demo only, but it shows the sorts of shooter functionality we support.



What's your business model?

It's a subscription model, but right now it's all about making it as easy and cheap as possible for developers, so you can launch and host small games on our Cloud solution for free.

It's free until the game reaches 100 concurrent users, which is roughly 20,000 MAUs. That's a significant game. From there, prices start at $19 a month for up to 500 CCUs - 100,000 MAUs.

As a developer, what's the integration process?

A developer can sign-up to our Cloud service for free at cloud.badumna.com and get started straight away. We have online demos and sample projects that will have you running multiplayer games in minutes.

Can you talk about any projects using your tech?

Right now all the projects are commercially confidential ahead of launches, so we're kind of in stealth mode with our clients.

Hundreds of developers have signed up for our Cloud service since we launched a couple of months ago and the first commercial games are due to launch in the coming weeks. The first game is a cross-platform 4x4 player synchronous mobile game for iOS and Android.

We've also been approached about tighter integration with major publishers and platforms.

They seem to like the idea of using Scalify as their foundation for both an internal and third-party synchronous publishing platform. If a publisher has lots of games we can join all the players on one single P2P network, which opens up some interesting opportunities for things like cross-game messaging, buddy lists and game discovery.

Badumna Cloud is a hit with the indie developer community that we wanted to help, but it's great to have that sort of interest from major publishers as well.

Thanks to Steve for his time.

You can find out more about Scalify and the Badumna Cloud here.