SuperGaming CEO Roby John and Google Cloud India MD Bikram Singh Bedi talk about the team-up, game dev, more

SuperGaming, the Pune-based video game studio recently announced a partnership with Google Cloud to bring its in-house live-ops engine, SuperPlatform to developers around the globe. We have already covered the announcement including all the features that game makers can add to their games to improve the experience for gamers. The game studio has already incorporated SuperPlatform in its existing multiplayer titles including PAC-Man and MaskGun. SuperGaming is also using SuperPlatform for its much-awaited Battle Royale title, Indus and Tower Conquest Metaverse Edition.

In the lead-up to the announcement of this collaboration, we got a chance to speak with SuperGaming founder and CEO, Roby John. The conversation covered several topics including the challenges, future of the platform, further development, Esports ecosystem focused features, and more.

We also spoke with Bikram Singh Bedi, the Managing Director for Google Cloud India about the team up and supporting game developers in India. Here is the complete conversation between IGN India and SuperGaming:

What prompted SuperGaming to bring SuperPlatform to the masses across the globe?

We have been running our games including MaskGun, Silly Royale and Tower Conquest which have over 200 million players on SuperPlatform. Our first large customer was PAC-MAN mobile which has now run on the platform for 3 years. Over the years, we have built, scaled, and solidified SuperPlatform to be the hyperscale cloud engine for multiplayer games and now we wanted to bring it to more game developers.

It is a platform built by game developers for game developers and helps both new and existing games. New games are able to come to market much faster with SuperPlatform because no existing solutions give them the game-specific tools we bring in. SuperPlatform empowers existing games to run live ops in a data driven and automated fashion with out-of-the-box solutions for sales and merchandising, live ops, marketing automation and game economy balance among other things.

Could you share any challenges that the team faced in making SuperPlatform public facing than the internal tool?

Just to be clear, it is a suite of tools, not a self-serve product, as every game requires tailoring and customisation to support its Game design. Building on top of this, we are able to provide this customized solutions for each game fairly quickly on our platform.

How does SuperGaming plan on improving SuperPlatform in the future? How will updates and upgrades come into the picture?

Games as products and the role they play in our lives are evolving and we will keep evolving SuperPlatform to enable game developers to evolve their products with it. One big change we see is that games are becoming increasingly multiplayer and social experiences. This is really the heart of SuperPlatform with our functionality like presence, match making, audio chat, video chat, and spectate but we will keep adding new ways for gamers to interact within the game, trade with each other, ultimately leading to building for the metaverse. With Creators and influencers becoming a large part of games, functionality to integrate them deeply within the game itself is also something that we are building in the platform.

Is there a game developer feedback system integrated where users can submit feedback for changes and tweaks for improvements in the SuperPlatform, to SuperGaming?

As a game developer, we have always been a very player-centric company listening closely to our players and building communities at the grassroot level. Now with a platform for game developers, we will take the same approach of working very closely closely with our customers and have tight feedback loops with them. Our teams pride ourselves on working very closely with every one of our developer partners.

🔴 What is the SuperPlatform?

It’s a game engine that we initially built to maintain, scale, optimize our games like @maskgunfps @SillyRoyale & PAC-MAN

It helps in managing live ops, matchmaking, player progression and data, analytics, server scaling, and merchandising (2/8) pic.twitter.com/9MP0NMI1Qk

— SuperGaming (@SuperGamingNPC) November 24, 2022

What made you go with Google cloud Platform to launch SuperPlatform instead of other cloud service platforms?

Google Cloud’s reach, technical expertise, and best-in-class infrastructure in terms of scalability, security and sustainability made it an obvious choice as the partner to bring SuperPlatform to market.

Another thing that is key for us and our SuperPlatform customers is to have the choice to migrate our entire orchestration easily as needed for cost-effectiveness without disrupting the game client or server integrations on the frontend. This is a major plus for choosing to launch SuperPlatform on Google Cloud.

Finally, being able to work closely with Google Cloud engineers to weed out any issues that arose was also a big plus.

Does SuperPlatform offer any features for Esports organizers or teams? Is there a plan to add live-ops support on other third-party games?

SuperPlatform is quite modularized, and the live ops functionalities can be integrated with any of the existing games.

SuperPlatform also brings in audio chat, video chat and spectate which can make games ready for Esports. But to actually run the tournament, we can integrate with any Esports platform as well.

What has the preliminary reaction to this move been? Have any game developers reached out to use the platform OR have you been test driving it with any game development studios or developers.

We have been getting a good amount of inbound interest from large gaming studios and creators globally wanting to create their own games. We cannot talk about them right now, but we will be announcing some very exciting customers in the near future.

Also, we have been running one of the world’s most popular games, PAC-MAN, on SuperPlatform since 2019.

Here is the complete conversation between IGN India and Google Cloud India:

What brought Google and SuperGaming together for this collaboration? What made Google move ahead with SuperPlatform?

India with its predominantly young population presents a great market for cloud gaming and for Google Cloud gaming is a huge focus area in India. We have significantly scaled our investments in these areas. We aim to empower game developers by minimizing infrastructure complexity and accelerating data insights.

Google Cloud and SuperGaming have collaborated to drive impact and innovation to bring its best-in-class live-ops engine, SuperPlatform, to game developers across the world. The partnership will improve the player experience such as content moderation, chat translation, toxicity detection, and more. It will enable game developers to make better games with battle-tested cloud infrastructure that currently powers all of SuperGaming’s efforts.

What is Google Cloud most excited about with this project?

We are hoping to set a benchmark for the experiences we can offer to global audiences. We believe this is a partnership we can significantly grow together and enable game developers to build securely at scale. SuperGaming has the vision to make World Class games come out of India and with our collaboration with SuperGaming we can make a significant contribution to the ecosystem.

How do you think Google Cloud Platform can help support the game developers from all over the globe in an even better matter? What else is Google Cloud Platform doing to promote game development in the Indian market?

At Google Cloud, Game Developers can easily deploy and manage game servers globally to deliver seamless multiplayer gaming experiences. We at Google Cloud help game developers find the right audience for their games, help monetize their games, accelerators for India gaming developers and provide ecosystem support and learning opportunities and mentorship for them. This year we are working with 50+ studios as part of our efforts through Gaming Growth Labs & App Scale Academy to help them along several different aspects.

We have launched several solution accelerators, tech & services partnerships & delivered training programs to make it easier to deploy & run games on Cloud. Our focus on open-source software like Agones, Openmatch among others, deep analytic & AI capabilities and cost efficiencies enables game developers to offer uninterrupted experience to gamers.

Editor’s Note: SuperGaming team provided access to Roby John (SuperGaming) and Bikram Singh Bedi (Google Cloud India) for this interaction.