How to Design an Infrastructure That Elevates Gaming Experiences

Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published in August 2023. It was updated in December 2025 to include the latest information. 

The gaming industry has experienced massive growth and is continuing to expand worldwide. The global video game market size was estimated at nearly US$300 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach US$600 billion by 2030.[1] The number of gamers is also continuing to climb. People of all ages flock to video games to connect with friends, meet new people, blow off some steam and have fun while finding community among those who share similar interests. The industry includes major gaming companies that have been around for decades, as well as small studios, young and old. As the industry evolves, gaming companies have to balance the need to support old and new games, as well as integrate AI, machine learning and virtual reality.

In the world of gaming, player experience is everything. Perhaps more so than in any other industry, improving customer experience and garnering customer loyalty can make or break a company. Gamers are a diverse, globally distributed community with vastly different technical competencies, hardware, software and connectivity. This makes standardizing the experience quite a challenge. Not to mention that creating player loyalty requires gaming companies to support both legacy and new titles. But all gamers share one thing in common: they want impeccable experiences, and when they have less-than-ideal ones, they won’t hesitate to talk about it publicly on social media and in online communities.

To meet the needs of their user base, gaming companies must overcome considerable technical complexity. Different platforms, studios, games and game versions can have different technical requirements. Some games are simpler, while others demand instant multi-player replay and ultra-fast connectivity. Maintaining a large catalog of titles also means supporting older games even though developers are often focused on newer ones. All the while, there’s fierce competition across the industry to accelerate time to market. The improvements necessary to facilitate a better player experience often require deeper than average network visibility and control, and a heavy focus on identifying and gathering new data on network performance.

Infrastructure requirements for gaming companies

It goes without saying that gaming generates a lot of data, and gaming companies have rigorous hardware, software and networking requirements. Let’s look at some of their most common infrastructure requirements and challenges:

• Compute capacity. Gaming companies need a large amount of compute capacity—often hundreds or thousands of servers distributed around the world, with regular deployments in new locations. Most use multiple public clouds, but cloud providers can’t always provide the compute they need in some areas due to available capacity, inventory of required compute types or connectivity limitations.
• Scalability. Gaming companies need to be able to scale up infrastructure quickly in times of high demand—such as when a new, popular title is released—and scale back down when demand decreases. At the same time, they must maximize the performance of each individual system, server, virtual machine (VM) or container these critical services are running on.
• Low latency. To ensure seamless user experiences, video games require high availability and low-latency connectivity. Gaming companies typically have baseline requirements for networking such as core RAM, disk and network speed. Ultimately, the speed of light has one of the greatest impacts here since it sets the minimum possible latency between two locations. Thus, getting infrastructure positioned as close to the players as possible is incredibly important. Granular visibility and control of network performance are also significant.
• Access to key service providers. Gaming companies tend to work with major network and IT service providers and vendors, so it’s important to be in a vendor-neutral environment where they can easily access all the services they need, without being locked into a single vendor that limits their flexibility.
• Standardization. Gaming companies have traditionally had limited options with hosting providers, which can lead to inconsistent experiences for their players and employees. Getting a standardized environment is advantageous as it ensures optimal performance, availability and reliability so that these companies can focus on what they do best: providing the ultimate gaming experience to their players.
• Security. The gamer experience is constantly threatened by bad actors who attack systems through every means possible, including DDoS attacks, account and identity theft, character and inventory theft, and many other methods of cheating that ruin the experience for others. Gaming companies have a continuously evolving challenge to combat these foes and develop new ways to keep players safe and having a good time. These innovations may require deploying even more infrastructure, enabling faster response times from security controls and dedicating development cycles to focus on security. System reliability is paramount to the success of many high-octane gaming platforms.

How the gaming industry is evolving to deliver better player experiences

Businesses in the gaming industry are constantly evolving their infrastructure to help them optimize the player experience—from cloud rebalancing initiatives to simplifying their hybrid multicloud networking.

Many of the more established companies have moved from a centralized to a distributed architecture. Others that were “born in the cloud” still need physical infrastructure in closer proximity to their users. Some gaming companies are working to more clearly define what their “edge” means—whether that’s moving towards the cloud or improving last-mile connectivity to players. And many are taking advantage of digital infrastructure solutions like virtual networking functions and software-defined interconnection to improve game performance.

Let’s look at a few stories:

i3D.net accelerates digital infrastructure to support global gaming growth

i3D.net—a Ubisoft company—provides low-latency application hosting and infrastructure services designed to meet the needs of the gaming industry. To best support the global player base, i3D.net moved part of their gaming platform to Equinix where they could gain proximity to users in edge locations. By optimizing their network backbone and using Equinix Fabric® to connect to essential cloud and network service providers, the company is delivering the lowest possible latency to their customers and removing the frustration of in-game lag.

AWS and Equinix offer gaming companies a better hybrid infrastructure experience

Digital infrastructure delivers significant benefits for gaming companies, both for interconnecting physical and virtual technologies and enabling fast, flexible scaling to meet ever-changing requirements. Equinix and Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer another approach for online gaming companies to address scalability and performance needs, while getting to market quickly and providing a great player experience. With AWS Direct Connect and AWS Outposts at Equinix, gaming studios and developers can have a reliable, secure, low-latency connection that bypasses the public internet and provides the network performance that online gaming demands. They can also take advantage of Equinix Fabric to connect into new markets, closer to their audience.

A platform for better gaming experience delivery

These are just a few examples of how Equinix provides the right components to facilitate a better player experience. As a global company with 270+ data centers around the world, we offer gaming companies connectivity in their required locations. The rich Equinix ecosystem provides access to thousands of cloud, network and IT service providers—and because Equinix is vendor-neutral, gaming companies maintain flexibility to work with their preferred partners. Equinix also enables companies to quickly and securely deploy on-demand digital infrastructure solutions for high performance and low latency. We do this all while providing granular visibility and control of the network, helping to define, or often redefine, what “the edge” means to each business.

We’ve worked with gaming industry leaders and have the expertise to understand what gaming companies and studios need, to help them solve their challenges, and to design the best infrastructure to support their growth.

To learn more about how Equinix hybrid multicloud networking solutions are helping companies improve customer experiences, download Hybrid Multicloud Networking For Dummies.

[1] Video Game Market (2025-2030), Grand View Research.