You finish work after a long day, cram yourself into a packed bus, and find yourself standing as the bus jolts and sways its way through city traffic. Eventually, you arrive at your stop, peel yourself out of the automatic doors and inhale deeply to refill your lungs with fresh outdoor air.
It’s just a short stroll to your apartment where you twist your key, swing open the door, and close it firmly behind you. You’re home. It’s just a couple of steps to the sofa, into which you just collapse, the weight of the day melting away.
Now, it’s time to blow off some steam – to relax and unwind. You know no better way than to fire up your TV and power on your console to settle down for a thrilling gaming session.
In this moment, the only things on your mind are winning and having fun. Yet, behind the scenes, there is a whole host of technologies quietly whirring away to ensure you get the best possible experience whilst you play.
But maybe you should take a moment to just appreciate these pieces of hardware and software that are the unsung heroes of your gaming sessions as, without them, your victories wouldn’t happen.
Load Balancing
Lag or ping is the kryptonite of your gaming session. It always hits at the worst possible moment and results in you glitching into a different part of the map or being taken out by an opponent.
This lag is the result of a delay in the communication of data between your device and the game’s server. This means that your control inputs are not synced to the live game, resulting in a strange attempt to correct this once the connection is made.
There are many things you can do to reduce your lag, such as getting a faster router, using an ethernet connection to your device, and upgrading your internet service. Doing all three of these will usually make a significant difference to your ping.
However, there’s also a lot the game’s publisher can do to lower your ping. One of the key solutions required for large titles with lots of players is a technology known as load balancing.
Essentially, load balancing shares the workload of sending data to and from gamers’ devices across multiple servers, rather than piling it all onto one. By distributing these servers around the world, the traffic can travel shorter distances, speeding up communication and reducing lag.
Load balancing can also provide resilience since most players will still be able to play, even if a server goes down, because they’ll simply be re-routed to a different one somewhere else.
Random Number Generators
Casino games have been popular for millennia and the internet has helped to breathe new life into these classic titles. Following the launch of the first-ever online casinos in the mid-1990s, millions of people now enjoy having a flutter from their computer, tablet, or smartphone.
This popularity has been helped by top brands that have created hundreds of different slot and table games, covering a diverse range of themes like zombies, fishing, ancient mythology, and space. In doing so, they can cater to a very broad spectrum of players, no matter their tastes and preferences.
However, making card, table, and slot games digital presented a challenge to iGaming companies as they needed a way to ensure fairness and trust for players without being able to use physical cards, wheels, dice, and reels.
That’s where random number generators come in. These clever pieces of technology provide this fairness by generating truly random inputs for the games’ software to use to generate unpredictable and pattern-free outcomes.
This is the same as shuffling cards or rolling dice as both provide inputs to games that are unpredictable, preventing players from being able to know which cards will be dealt next or which numbers will be rolled, as having this information removes any jeopardy from the games.