Let’s talk about security. It still is an often so forgotten aspect because it costs time and money now, while it saves you so many headaches than if you do so later in the future.
There are a lot of emotions involved with gaming; from players themselves, but also let’s not forget monetization, Twitch streams with subscribers, esports events with prizes. There are a lot of people that think nothing is more enjoyable than kicking down the sandcastle, ‘owning’ the servers that clan, or streamer, is currently playing on.
If you work with anything gaming-related, expect to get a lot of ‘free stress testing’ and other nastiness directed towards your infrastructure, network, and game. The battle for security starts by dedicating some time in your development process to it; namely ensuring that your server doesn’t easily crash when it’s fed random gibberish data.
That way you can make sure that people cannot easily spoof real game traffic or send many fake connection attempts to run you out of resources. Maybe consider even adding some special preambles to the traffic stream, making it harder for the average scripter to duplicate these kinds of attacks. Or maybe think about integrating your matchmaker, which sends any new player IPs who wish to join, to your game server, or firewall or platform partner, while automatically dropping any other requests arriving at the server itself.
We’ve seen a lot of incidents where new exploits for games were being written and within no time it was shared on closed social media groups. Before we knew it, whole continents were taken down for that game because it was constantly being attacked. Unfortunately, this usually happens quite sometime after the game’s release at which point it becomes incredibly difficult, to get a game development team back together to work on code made years ago to resolve this issue.
This has a major impact on the player’s experience; getting booted from a server once during the evening is acceptable. However, after multiple incidents, those players are unlikely to come back and might simply switch to a competitor’s game instead!
