Lead solutions consultant at Keynote Systems Robert Castley discusses the specifics for optimising a gaming website with Jenni Shuttleworth

What does Keynote Systems do?

Keynote is a mobile and internet monitoring and analysis company that can help firms understand the performance of their websites in terms of reliability and speed. The company is global and works across many industry sectors, but has a great deal of experience in the gaming sector, understanding the critical importance of performance when it comes to gaming sites, regularly comparing the performance of the UK's top gaming websites. With Keynote, companies know precisely how their websites, content, and applications perform on actual browsers, networks and mobile devices.
We have the largest global network of monitoring infrastructure in over 192 global locations and use real web browsers to do the monitoring, so we’re not trying to be a web browser, we’re actually using web browsers that users use. We also do load testing, where we can generate loads of up to 16 million page views per hour. We do mobile web performance testing and mobile applications testing using real handsets like the iPhone, the Blackberry, the Nokias, etc.
The last section of our business is what we call ‘customer experience’ where we recruit a panel who will be sent tasks on a given website or websites and we will track them through those websites and discover how easy it was to complete the said task.

What experience does Keynote Systems have in the gaming sector?

We’re quite popular in the gaming sector. Because we’re the UK division, we don’t seem to have the restrictions and we also cover the countries that are allowed to run gaming and gambling sites. We’ve got customers in Gibraltar, Ireland, the UK and Israel, which is one of the areas that needs a lot on the R&D side of things. We’re proud to have one customer - Pocket Kings - which is famous for its Full Tilt poker game and which is a very big customer of ours. We also have Betfair for the spread betting and we have Bet 365; we have a number of those kinds of gaming sites. Some are cropping up in the US now too.

What services can you offer a gaming company to help optimise its site?

There are two answers to that and it all depends on the gaming company itself. If the gaming company is providing an online experience where the user can interact via a web browser, then we have our real web browser monitoring technologies and support, silver light flash, which are probably the two main technologies in order to provide the end user with a gaming experience. We can monitor people interacting with flash-based applications within the web browser. If the company on the other hand provides users with a client where they have to physically download a client application and install it, we monitor the availability of these downloads because they are usually provided by CVN companies. CVN is where they will provide the download on a server in the country of the user’s origin, which will speed things up drastically rather than trying to serve everything from a single location. Obviously, these clients are updated and patched regularly with new features, so they’re keen to ensure these patches are also available for download and they’re downloaded swiftly. With these gaming companies, if users suddenly find a lag or they can’t get what they want, they will quickly disappear and go somewhere else. So it’s all about retaining their customer base because as soon as they get user abandonments, that’s not good for them. Once they’re in, they’re going to spend money and they’re going to spend a lot of money and that is the key there.
The other part that we can do is that sometimes the desktop clients that they download, even though they’re desktop applications, they will interact with their back-end services using http calls, straight normal
web-based transactional calls. Again, we can monitor those. We basically simulate those calls with our technology to ensure, once they go out, we get the required response back. We’re not actually using the application itself but we’re using the calls that the application would make, the back-end services. Gaming sites on the whole always want to monitor their home pages, the rest of the site isn’t that important. It’s all about ensuring that people can get to their website to see what they have on offer. Also, sometimes if a login is required to check account profiles, account details etc, they’ll want to ensure that the login is available and performing well too.

What considerations need to be made for both full and mobile sites for gaming companies?

These days, we’re beginning to see interest from the gaming industry as far as mobile goes. I think it’s people’s inhibitions about using their mobile device to do transactions that are monetary based, people need to get their faith in that. As far as the website goes, people seem to be quite happy to be sat at home on the end of their broadband connection, put their account details in and play the games and spend their money. On the mobile side, we’re seeing a slow shift into the ability to have applications, so they are developing bespoke applications that will run on the mobile platforms, but there is interest surfacing at the moment. There are in-house purchases available as well, so we’re going to see a shift to that, but we’re all geared up ready. We have real mobile phones installed in our data centres that will do over the air transactions using these applications. So again, we’re all ready for it but I haven’t seen to date a major push in this direction.

How can an online gaming company realistically improve the user experience for its customer?

It’s all about speed these days. If you look at a company like Betfair that does more transactions a day than the London Stock Exchange, you’re looking at seven million transactions a day. People who want to place bets want to place them now because it’s critical if they miss a window, so it’s all about performance. Also, now that we expect the laws to start changing in the US, they’re going to have even more players wanting to come online, so you’re going to see the gaming industry grow as far as its customer base, once some of these laws are lifted. It’s already huge today but being able to perform this from a country as big as America, well, it’s going to be massive.
If the same thing applies in the money trading markets, there is a huge surge in this now and we’re seeing some of these trading websites,
(it’s not gaming I know, but it’s still playing around gambling money) there’s a huge surge on this at the moment and they’re investing a lot of money on making the sites responsive, quick and the ability for them to trade their money at the drop of a hat. So it is all about speed.
Speed is particularly important for in-play betting. The fact that somebody is going to score the next goal or try in the next 10 minutes, if your site takes 10 seconds to load it’s critical to that end user that they get that bet on and if they don’t get that bet on and then find out they lost £20, they’re not going to be a happy customer.

Are there are any common issues that gaming companies are facing with their websites at the moment?

With their websites not so much. It’s more to do with the client availability, well that’s what I’m seeing. If they put out a new release, then they want to give their users the best possible experience of using their application, whether it’s a poker application or blackjack.
As far as the gaming companies that choose to do this all within the browser, that’s a very difficult thing to monitor. The way the web measurements work is it’s a repetitive measurement, it’s the same thing being done every time. You can’t replicate that in something like a game of poker, where one time you’ll come into the poker room there’ll be four players and the next time you come to the poker room there might be eight players. You can’t place your chips and your bets. So what they tend to do is just monitor transactions, transactions that the website would make, not actually monitoring the physical applications themselves.

What changes do you anticipate taking place in the gaming industry?

We’re seeing a huge demand, not from the gaming sector at the moment but from the media sector, for the iPad, basically tablet-based monitoring. We have tablet-based monitoring for the web side of things but the real device, physically having an iPad in the data centre connected to the internet and interacting with that device, we are working towards doing that after our next major release. So, hopefully support for the Samsung and the iPad because they are the two most dominant players at the moment. But we’ve got RIM coming out with its PlayBook soon and we’ve got HP touting its new TouchPad as well, so there is a shift. Trying to play poker on a tiny little iPhone stream or something like that is not the most pleasurable gaming experience. So I guess that these gaming companies are going to start releasing an increasing number of apps that will work on these larger 7-8ins screens.

What advice would you offer an online gaming company at the moment?

I think it’s critical for these kinds of sites to conduct regular and vigorous load testing, especially doing major release cycles. They need to be able to push their sites to the limit to ensure that when users do come online in their thousands, that the site is able to handle that load and it doesn’t degrade. Or if they do find it degrades, at what point does it degrade and how can they fix that to ensure that it doesn’t. So it’s all about making sure the site is up and making sure that the performance is good, consistently good. Also, at the same time, ensuring that when they come to do a major release, that the site performs very, very well to ensure that the customer experience isn’t impacted at all.