UPDATED 12:45 EDT / APRIL 29 2021

video game fortnite video screen CLOUD

Google Cloud and 2K introduce ‘Open Saves’ open-source storage for game developers

Google Cloud, in partnership with American game publisher 2K, today announced the development of an open-source, cloud-native storage interface called “Open Saves” for video game developers.

Video games, whether single-player or multiplayer, create immersive and persistent experiences and must track numerous variables and items in order to provide the best possible entertainment.

In role-playing games, game data would be player inventory, maps, nearby enemies and story progression. In a racing game, it might be the player’s fleet of racing cars that they’ve built up and modified, including paint jobs, rims, tricked-out headlights, racetracks, all the conditions of the races, including the cups, achievements, track times, scores and any other state data.

Game developers need to store numerous different types of data, such as saves, inventory, patches and replays, but the system itself must remain at its highest performance and always available, scalable and cost-effective.

With Open Saves, video game development teams can store game data in the cloud without having to make technical decisions on which storage solution to use, and it connects to Cloud Storage, MemoryStore or Firestore on the backend.

According to Google, Open Saves rests on three design principles: simplicity, speed and scalability. In simplicity, it provides a unified, well-defined endpoint for all metadata, structured and unstructured objects that are fed into the cloud that can be stored and recalled using gRPC, a high-performance, open-source universal remote procedure call framework.

For speed, Open Saves uses a built-in caching system to optimize data placement based on anticipated access frequency and data size. As a result, low latency is preserved for smaller binary objects and high throughput is preserved for big objects.

And for scalability, the Open Saves application programming interface can run on either Google Kubernetes Engine or Cloud Run. That provides Open Saves the capability to handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second.

The entire system is designed with extensibility in mind and can be integrated into any game – on mobile or console, multiplayer or single-player and regardless of genre.

Google is actively developing Open Saves in partnership with 2K Games – an active GitHub repository is available for reference — and the server is written in Go, but many programming languages can be used to connect to it.

Photo: Pixabay

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