Challenge
HXRO Games came to Cloud with an exciting new idea centered around fantasy sports and crypto currency. We were immediately intrigued and our experience with Fantasy sports gaming sites made Cloud the perfect fit for this challenge. The new web application would need to appeal to users who love the excitement of fantasy gaming, but also buying and trading crypto currencies. The new platform would require an integration to reliable crypto exchanges for pricing information, real-time updates, the ability to manage and support user accounts, and manage multiple game types all within a secure, stable and scalable environment. The site needed an administrative backend to connect everything together and manage player accounts and games on the site.
Solution
In order to properly scope and plan for a project of this size and complexity, Cloud Construct guided the HXRO team through a detailed roadmap phase which accounted for some high level wireframing, technical discovery, and functional requirement documentation in order to customize the solution based on user needs, business goals, technical possibilities and other factors like timeline and launch scope. Once this was complete, both teams had a clear picture of what was in front of us. We set out to develop the technical concepts for the initial game release and wireframing and designing around this feature. Throughout the process we learned a great deal, and were able to pivot in order to develop another game that was more business critical in the timeline. This game is called Moon Rekt and it runs every 5, 15, and 60 minutes. You're able to compete against users on the site by wagering your HXRO Tokens on the pricing changes of certain crypto currencies. This game was new and exciting and really allowed for a fast pace gaming experience. Since going live we've been able to add other cryptocurrency variants of the game, and are close to supporting other currencies on the platform. In order to properly deliver the experience and scale that Hxro Games was targeting for their first launch, we needed to not only push things forward on the design front, but also on the engineering side with technologies that had never been used together before. Microsoft's Azure cloud allowed for some key technical decisions to be made in order to scale the site with growth. SQL Azure, Cosmos DB, Windows Azure Webapps, SignalR as a Service, Azure Functions, and Angular 7 were all key in bringing together a solid platform. Integrating with a custom data feed for pricing from exchanges and also the Ethereum block chain, were key components of the transactional side of the site. As the site scaled, we knew there would be the need to support thousands of games and millions of users across the HXRO Universe. These factors required us to always be designing with scale in mind. Supporting millions of trade events per minute while also scoring and paying out live contests every 5 minutes requires precision timing and orchestration of processes. Microsoft's Azure cloud allowed us to stand up these processes fairly quickly and leverage many of their services to keep the hosting footprint small and cost down as we developed. Adopting a document database structure for games and entries allows us to easily deliver static content to users across the globe and standup multiple datacenter configurations to make sure we're in compliance with regulations at a country basis. Targeting a beta launch at the end of the 2018 year, Cloud and HXRO pushed forward together to make sure we delivered a product to the crypto community by year end. The initial launch actually went through on Christmas Eve and the first game was played that night! Users filled the games and the initial phase of Beta began.
Results
The result of the collaboration between HXRO and Cloud was a great success. Like any initial launch there were some bumps in the road, but any new product will always face these challenges. Long nights, patience, and the will to push forward were key to this project putting it where it is now. With the success of Beta, HXRO is now able to go fully live and has received a round of funding that will ensure their expansion into new games with this platform as the center of their gaming universe. The popularity of HXRO has grown and games are being played across the globe, with some incredible adoption numbers as of 5/23: • More than 9,000 unique active users on the platform • More than 38,000 users registered to the platform More than 45,000 games played • Over 125,000,000 HXRO tokens have been entered into games • User wait list of more than 350,000 • Total platform page views of more than 2.2 million • Moon/ Rekt has now been played in more than 170 countries worldwide • The Cloud and Hxro team are committed to moving forward together and adding new features and functionality as the market demands. New games, new features, and growing the Hxro brand will be key milestones for the second part of 2019. You can see much more current information on Hxro.io, as well as on their Telegram or Twitter accounts.
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