Manassas, VA - February 21, 2017 - LeaseWeb USA Inc., one of the world's largest hosting brands, will be accompanied by Citadel Studios at the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, February 27-March 3.
Citadel Studios is developing Shards Online, the first MMO to support community modding and hosting, allowing players to design and create their own worlds. The company is also part of the LeaseWeb startup program, which provides financial and technical support to high-potential startups that allows them to quickly build and scale their new businesses in the Cloud.
“In Shards Online, players can run their own servers, which adds a whole new level of technical challenges for deployment,” said Derek “Supreem” Brinkmann, Citadel Studios founder and CEO, and former lead engineer of Ultima Online. “LeaseWeb helped us design a custom architecture that already has the game running with incredible performance. With their 17 data centers worldwide, we’ll be able to get close to our fans no matter where they live.”
The Shards Online virtual world simulates the objects, non-playable characters and map areas with a high level of realism, which demands extensive CPU power in the data center for processing. LeaseWeb developed a hybrid cloud architecture that allocates the simulation tasks to dedicated servers, while using cloud services for less demanding areas like account login and management.
Shards Online, currently in Alpha, will launch on Steam later this year. LeaseWeb is working with the Citadel team to construct a cloud platform that can accommodate the large traffic spikes that come at launch, without locking in a resource commitment that exceed the needs of the long-term player base.
“Online games grow like wildfire when they get successful and noticed,” said Lex Boost, CEO of LeaseWeb USA. “Our job at LeaseWeb is creating an environment that lets them scale quickly and painlessly, so that success doesn’t become bittersweet. We’re big believers in the Citadel Studios team and are proud to have them as part of the LeaseWeb startup program.”
LeaseWeb offers 17 data centers worldwide, with more than 70,000 total servers. This puts game developers close to their customers, minimizing the lag that can wreck quick-twitch online gaming. For customers, support teams in the United States and Europe are on-call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
LeaseWeb’s portfolio of solutions includes dedicated hosting with fully customizable infrastructure, a broad range of cloud server hosting solutions, hybrid cloud deployments and colocation services. LeaseWeb offers enterprise-level equipment, infrastructure redundancy and superior SLAs across all US-based facilities. Geographic spread also provides the safest disaster recovery and remote backup solutions for maximum uptime.
Come visit LeaseWeb USA at the 2017 Game Developers Conference at Booth 2235 in the South Hall.
About Citadel Studios
Citadel Studios is dedicated to building next-generation sandbox games inspired by legends like Ultima, EVE Online, and Minecraft. We believe in fostering rich communities and giving power to our players in an effort to make our worlds live and breathe. Not only will you be able to change your surroundings, but the very of the nature of the game changes with you. Shards Online is our premiere title and is expected to launch in 2017.