Wargaming is one of the leaders in the free-to-play MMO market. With 20+ years’ experience in the gaming industry, this developer has introduced more than 15 game titles to various platforms.
Among these titles are award winning bestsellers like World of Tanks, World of Warships and World of Warplanes.
How the need for broadcasts arose
For over five years, Wargaming have needed to deliver multiple updates for all their online game titles all over the world. They have achieved this using Gcore content delivery network (CDN).
Most recently, Wargaming began to utilize Gcore’ media platform (Media Platform) for uninterrupted online broadcasts on all continents.
The first large-scale experience of cooperation with the Gcore team was the organization of WG Fest festival broadcast in December 2018. We were broadcasting two different streams in Russian and in English. Both signals were presented on all the largest streaming spaces of the planet and TV channels.
Maxim Khvashchevsky
Broadcasting Technical Producer at WargamingHow we brought together cosmonauts and gamers
Streaming from space was a joint initiative of the Russian state corporation Roscosmos and Wargaming.
The stream dedicated to Cosmonautics Day was to be broadcasted in High-Definition, worldwide. As Wargaming already had a positive experience of the streaming technology provided by Gcore, as a trusted vendor, Gcore was utilized as the main infrastructure partner for this unique project.
We had another successful cooperation now, with the World of Tanks special event dedicated to the International Day of Cosmonautics. The Gcore team was able to provide a high-quality continuous signal with the required parameters on all required platforms.
I would like to emphasize the comfort of working with technical support specialists.
Maxim Khvashchevsky
Broadcasting Technical Producer at WargamingAs you can appreciate, the dates including April 12 to 15, 2019, was the first time Gcore was tasked to arrange a broadcast from space!
Together, the Media Platform and CDN, brought together World of Tanks players and cosmonauts of the International Space Station.
What was broadcasted from space?
The games began with live greetings from orbit from Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Kononenko, members of the ISS crew. Another cosmonaut, Oleg Artemyev, held an interactive online quiz for tank lovers, with trivia devoted to space and space technologies and prizes awarded for erudite viewers.
Where you could watch the streams?
Festive trivia dedicated to Cosmonautics Day was broadcasted on a specific resource, WG Watch.
Media Platform is a convenient video broadcasting solution providing on-the-fly stream transcoding and adaptive bitrate streaming.
Gcore streaming servers are located across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, connected by global network including 47 points of presence (PoPs). Gcore’ network continues to grow to new regions, year-on-year with the expansion of projects together with Wargaming and many other international clients.
Gcore’ media platform allows broadcasts of video with up to 4K quality, anywhere in the world. Dashboard and statistics are easily accessed using an integrated ‘all-in-one’ control panel.
The main specificity of the project was connected with the need to synchronize with the International Space Station, which makes 16 revolutions around the Earth in 24 hours, and there were four game days ahead.
Our team quickly created an additional software, which allowed to meet this challenge and to continue to broadcast uninterruptedly the special information and entertainment content for three days after the event itself.
The audience was able to watch this stream at WG Watch. In general, the preparation for the project by Gcore took no more than three days, players and viewers were satisfied with the result.
