Global Gaming Giant Chooses CDNetworks to Deliver Cross-Regional Game Distribution

Background

The customer is a leading global online game developer and publisher with a dominant market share in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Taiwan. Widely recognized for developing one of the world’s most downloaded mobile battle royale games, boasting over 150 million daily active users (DAU), the customer also exclusively licenses and publishes top-tier MOBA and Sports titles in key regions.

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Challenges

Rapid growth in installation package sizes and frequent high-quality updates create significant pressure to deliver gigabyte-sized assets. Serving millions of players simultaneously across regions with fragmented network infrastructures further complicates the process, making it difficult for the customer to ensure fast, reliable game downloads and in-app updates for players.

1. Instantaneous Spike on Patch Days

Major season updates can generate sudden, massive spikes in traffic, especially with hundreds of millions of download requests occurring within a few minutes in regions such as Vietnam and Indonesia. The spikes can quickly exceed origin capacity and saturate key interconnects along the delivery path, creating hotspots of congestion that negatively impact download performance for players.

2. Global Network Fragmentation and Last-Mile Gap

Serving players across Southeast Asia and Latin America involves dealing with a highly fragmented ISP landscape and unstable mobile access networks, particularly on the last mile to end-user devices. High packet loss and network jitter often lead to stalled or failed downloads, slowing player access to game updates, and creating operational challenges and pressure on servers for the customer.

3. Data Corruption in Massive Game Downloads

Distributing multi-gigabyte game patches across fragmented networks of Southeast Asia and Latin America created a critical challenge for the customer. Packet loss and transmission errors lead to a high volume of “installation failed” errors at the user end, forcing players to re-download entire packages. The massive amount of redundant data transfer degraded the user experience, increased churn, and significantly increased bandwidth costs.

4. Origin Server Load and Bandwidth Pressure

Massive game files distribution to a global user base generates astronomical bandwidth demand, especially during simultaneous updates. The surge of concurrent download and range requests can easily overwhelm origin servers and saturate egress capacity, triggering cascading failures across storage and application layers, which can turn a routine update into a full‑blown availability incident.

5. Malicious Scanners and the “404 Flood” Risk

High-profile game launches often attract malicious traffic, posing a serious risk to server stability. The customer faced frequent resource exhaustion attacks, where bad actors initiated massive waves of abnormal requests, such as 404 floods or unauthorized hotlinking, to bypass the cache and hit the origin server directly. These invalid requests caused sharp spikes in origin load and threatened to paralyze authentication and login services during peak gameplay hours.

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Solutions

Sudden bandwidth surges and origin load risks require a solution that protects servers while maintaining fast delivery. CDNetworks delivered a tailored Game Download Acceleration Solution designed to meet the customer’s need for high-speed, reliable, and secure game distribution. Leveraging a massive global infrastructure and intelligent scheduling technologies, the solution addresses the key challenges of large-scale game delivery and ensures a seamless player experience.

1. Delivering Seamless Game Updates During Massive Traffic Spikes

Tbps-level traffic surges during instantaneous patch releases were absorbed through CDNetworks’ purpose-built delivery infrastructure for massive scale.

• Vast Global Capacity: With over 2,800 PoPs across 87+ countries, CDNetworks provides the customer with unmatched coverage in hard-to-reach areas of Southeast Asia and Latin America. This immense capacity absorbs the “Thundering Herd” traffic locally at the edge, effectively preventing the customer’s origin servers from being overwhelmed.

• Intelligent Scheduling: Our self-developed Global Load Balancing system directs every player to optimal PoP via the fastest, most reliable path available. Stability is maintained even when traffic spikes 50x above normal, keeping gameplay uninterrupted during peak update periods.

• Optimization for Large Files: We utilize smart segmentation to divide massive installation packages into standardized chunks. By employing sequential prefetching, the edge node proactively buffers subsequent data blocks during downloads. This mechanism not only facilitates multi-threaded parallel downloading and resumable transfers but also eliminates latency between chunks, ensuring maximum throughput for gigabyte-sized assets.

2. Enhancing Cross-Region Delivery with Advanced Network Optimization

Addressing the challenges of fragmented networks and the last-mile gap in Southeast Asia and Latin America, the transmission layer and scheduling logic were optimized within the CDNetworks platform to ensure smoother downloads and reliable update delivery for the customer.

• QUIC Implementation: Enabling UDP-based QUIC protocols, we eliminated Head-of-Line blocking and utilized 0-RTT connection establishment. Players experience stable high-speed downloads even in weak network environments.

• Proprietary Transmission Optimization: CDNetworks’ self-developed transmission algorithms further accelerate traffic by 30–130%. Through adaptive congestion control, the system actively mitigates packet loss and latency, squeezing maximum throughput out of unstable connections.

• HTTPDNS: Replacing traditional Local DNS with HTTPDNS allows us to bypass ISP caching issues and DNS hijacking, pushing the optimal, healthy edge PoP IP directly to the terminal device for the fastest possible connection.

3. Enabling Error-Free Game Downloads Through Dual-Layer Verification

Zero-error game delivery was guaranteed by deploying a proprietary File Integrity Validation system that functions seamlessly regardless of the origin server’s configuration.

With CDNetworks’ dual-layer verification mechanism, the solution automatically compares MD5 checksums against the values provided in the origin response headers. When no checksum data is available, the Intelligent Integrity Monitoring Platform independently calculates and verifies content hashes at the edge. If any inconsistency is detected, the system proactively purges the corrupted file and triggers an instant re-fetch, ensuring a pristine copy is cached before it ever reaches the player.

4. Maximizing Offload and Stability via Intelligent Tiered Origin Shield

CDNetworks implemented a robust Tiered Caching architecture to safeguard the customer’s origin servers during peak traffic events.

• Request Collapsing Strategy: Millions of edge nodes no longer flood the origin directly. High-performance Mid-Tier cache servers act as an Origin Shield Layer, aggregating concurrent requests for the same patch file into a single request back to the origin.

• 99%+ Cache Hit Ratio: 99% of traffic is served from the cache, creating a protective buffer that guarantees 100% origin uptime during peak “flash crowds” while significantly reducing egress bandwidth costs.

5. Securing Player Experience with Intelligent Traffic Defense

To protect the infrastructure from resource exhaustion attacks, an edge-based abnormal traffic detection system was deployed. CDNetworks’ platform monitors response codes in real-time and identifies abnormal spikes in 404 errors, a common sign of a malicious scan or flood. Malicious IPs and unauthorized hotlinking attempts are instantly blocked at the edge, preventing invalid requests from traversing the network. Our proactive defense ensures the customer’s origin infrastructure is completely shielded from volumetric attacks and only processes legitimate player traffic.

6. Ensuring Zero-Failure Stability with Major Event Support

CDNetworks provides a dedicated Major Event Assurance service, treating every version update as a mission-critical operation. Our premium service encompasses the entire event lifecycle, from proactive risk assessments, bandwidth reservation, and load testing to the establishment of a 24/7 real-time command center, ensuring immediate anomaly detection and zero-failure stability during the most intense traffic periods.

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Results and Benefits

• 100% Uptime on Patch Days: Tbps-level traffic spikes, up to 20x regular traffic volume during patch days were absorbed with zero service interruption.

• 40% Faster Downloads in Complex Networks: Advanced transmission protocols and intelligent scheduling optimization significantly boosted download speeds, directly improving conversion rates.

• Zero File Corruption Failures: Autonomous integrity validation ensured 100% file integrity, eliminating wasted bandwidth from re-downloads.

• 99%+ Origin Offload: The Origin Shield architecture served nearly all requests from the edge, drastically reducing egress bandwidth costs.

• Impenetrable Security Shield: Proactively blocked 99% of malicious scans and 404 floods at the edge, protecting critical game logic servers.

• 24/7 Expert Event Assurance: Dedicated support ensured smooth operations during mission-critical launches, allowing the client to operate without any infrastructure-related concerns.

Leveraging CDNetworks’ robust infrastructure and tailored optimization technologies, the customer successfully overcame the complexities of cross-border game distribution. The partnership provides a stable, secure, and cost-effective distribution across all regions, giving the customer the reliability to scale global release.