At 3:00 a.m., I stared at the traffic curve on the monitor screen that had spiked red, my fingers unconsciously tapping on my long-cold coffee cup. This is the seventh DDoS attack we've encountered since our game went live, and it's also the third month we've been using a well-known high defense CDN service. Old Wang, the technical director, laughed bitterly beside him, "It's happening again, this bunch of grandsons picks the time when we are doing activities to do it." Operation girl Xiao Chen was so anxious that she almost cried out: "The player group has already exploded, they all said that we are a 'potato server', and the app store rating dropped 0.8 in half an hour..."
This scene, I believe every game developer is no stranger. Three years ago when our team was first established, we, like most of our peers, did not hesitate to choose a traditional high-defense CDN - after all, the big brand, price transparency, and complete documentation seem to be the most secure choice. But after more than two years of battle baptism, after experiencing countless late-night emergencies, player loss and business losses, we finally turned to a full-scale professional game shield solutions. Today I'll talk about this seemingly simple but seemingly simple choice for countless game teams to step in the pit with my personal experience.
The Five Deadly Injuries of Traditional High Defense CDNs
1.1 "Protocol Blindness"
I remember that on the first day of our first MMORPG launch, the server monitoring was all normal - bandwidth utilization was 65% and CPU load was not high, but player feedback was unusually laggy. It took three hours of troubleshooting to find out that the TCP protocol optimization of the high-defense CDN was simply not suitable for our game's real-time battle system. Traditional CDNs optimize the HTTP/HTTPS protocol beautifully, but for the game-specific private TCP protocol, it's like putting a bicycle chain on a F1 car.
real caseSwordsman World 3" technical person in charge had shared in a technical salon that when they used a cloud vendor's high-defense CDN, due to the conflict between the TCP connection multiplexing strategy and the game's logic, resulting in a 200-400ms delay in the release of the player's skills in 30%, the team took two months to locate the problem with the CDN's protocol stack.
1.2 "King of Manslaughter"
During the summer campaign last year, our daily activity suddenly plummeted by 37%. Data analysis showed that Android users from Guangdong, Zhejiang and other places lost the most serious. After a week of investigation, it was found that the "intelligent protection" of the high-defense CDN judged all users using a certain brand of cell phone assistant as robots - because these tools will pre-load resources, which triggered the CC protection rules of the CDN. What's more ironic is that these users, who were mistakenly killed, are precisely our most important paying group.
data comparison::
| Protection Program | false positive rate | primary target of manslaughter |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional High Defense CDN | 8-15% | Simulator users, gas pedal users, region-specific IP segments |
| Professional Game Shield | 0.2-1.5% | Basically no specific model |
1.3 "Sky-high bills"
In Q2 2023, we nearly had a heart attack when we received a bill from a cloud vendor - a single month's protection cost of $280,000, nine times the usual. On closer inspection, it turned out that during a CC attack that lasted 6 hours, the elastic capacity expansion of the CDN was automatically turned on and billed by the second. The most magical thing is that after the attack, we found that the 60% attack traffic actually came from the same botnet, and the CDN's global cleaning nodes failed to automatically share the blacklist.
Cost Comparison Table(Take an MMO game with 500,000 daily activity as an example):
| Type of fee | Traditional High Defense CDN | Professional Game Shield |
|---|---|---|
| basic monthly fee | 15,000 | ¥18,000 |
| Flexibility costs during attacks | ¥8,000/hour | fixed rate |
| Loss of income due to manslaughter | Approx. ￥120,000/month | About ￥5,000/month |
| Cost of technology-optimized manpower | 2 person-months/year | 0.5 person-months/year |
1.4 "Slow motion playback"
We have done an A/B test: let players in the same area access the game server through high defense CDN and direct connection respectively. The results were shocking - the average delay of combat commands increased by 83ms for players who passed through the CDN. Packet splitting analysis revealed that CDN nodes are extremely inefficient in processing small game packets (usually less than 100 bytes), and multiple packet splitting/grouping resulted in additional delay. For action games that require 60FPS smoothness, this is a disaster.
Technical details: Differences between game packets and traditional Web requests:
- Packet size: Web requests average 8KB, game packets average 67 bytes
- Request frequency: Web page 3-5 requests/sec, game 30-50 packets/sec
- Latency sensitivity: 200ms acceptable for web, <50ms for games
1.5 "Illusion of security"
In the third month of using a major international CDN, our source site IP was suddenly listed on a hacker forum. Afterwards, we found that one of the edge nodes of the CDN incorrectly returned the source site information in response to a specific DNS query. What's even scarier is that this vulnerability existed for 11 months before it was fixed. During this time, we had to spend 20,000 RMB per month to buy additional cloud firewalls to protect the source site.
Five surprises from Pro Game Shield
2.1 Protocol-level optimization
In the first week of switching to a professional game shield, we noticed a sudden change in the style of the player community - "today's server is so silky smooth", "zero delay skills" comments began to brush the screen. The technical team disassembled and found that the protocol stack of GameShield was specially optimized for small packet transmission:
- zero-copy technology: avoid multiple copies of game packets between kernel and user states
- dynamic slicing algorithm: Automatically adjusts MTU size according to network conditions
- Priority Queue: Ensure that combat commands are prioritized over other data transfers
real time data::
| norm | Traditional CDN | Gameshield | elevation |
|---|---|---|---|
| packet transmission delay | 76ms | 19ms | 75% |
| Packet loss recovery speed | 450ms | 120ms | 73% |
| Command Synchronization Accuracy | 89% | 99.6% | 12% |
2.2 Intelligent Cleaning
What amazes us most about GameShield is its cleaning algorithm based on player behavior modeling. Unlike traditional CDNs with simple and crude IP/frequency rules, GameShield analyzes:
- Operating Heat Map: Real player actions are focused on specific areas of the screen
- behavioral sequence model: Predictable sequencing of normal player actions
- Device Fingerprint Characterization: 300+ parameters including GPU models, input devices, etc.
case (law)In one campaign, the attackers simulated 2,000 "normal players", but GameShield analyzed the movement trajectories of these "players" (completely straight, without any fine-tuning) and the combat intervals (fixed intervals accurate to milliseconds), and identified and isolated 99.31 TP3T of malicious traffic in 5 minutes, with zero false positives from real players. Within 5 minutes, GameShield recognized and isolated 99.3% of malicious traffic, with zero false positives from real players.
2.3 Cost revolution
GameShield's "Attack Immunity" billing model has revolutionized our finances:
- Capping of costs during attacks: Unlike traditional CDNs where elastic billing can skyrocket with the size of the attack
- Shared Defense Pool: Sharing the cost of base defense among all users
- prophylactic defense: Early blocking of known sources of attack through threat intelligence
Financial Comparison(2023 data):
| norm | Traditional CDN period | Age of the Game Shield |
|---|---|---|
| Percentage of expenditure on security | 12% | 5% |
| Attack-related losses | ¥3.8 million. | ¥410,000 |
| Accuracy of financial projections | ±35% | ±8% |
2.4 Global co-service
When our game was launched in Southeast Asia, the traditional CDN's "optimal node" algorithm caused Malaysian players to be routed to Japanese nodes, with a latency as high as 220ms. after switching to GameShield's Anycast+ intelligent routing:
- Dynamic Path Selection: Evaluate the optimal route every 5 minutes
- Protocol Optimization: Customize UDP/TCP parameters for different regional network characteristics
- edge computing: Decentralize some of the game logic to nodes close to the player
Player Latency Comparison(Malaysia → Singapore):
| ISP | Traditional CDN | Gameshield |
|---|---|---|
| Maxis | 178ms | 49ms |
| TIME | 203ms | 52ms |
| Unifi | 192ms | 45ms |
2.5 Ecological integration
Most surprisingly, GameShield has brought not only security, but also business growth:
- Anti-spamming boosts payment rates: When the leaderboards are no longer dominated by plug-ins, normal players will be more willing to recharge their money
- Stability enhances retention: 7-day retention rate increased from 31% to 44%
- Data Enabled Operations: Cleaning attack attempt data from logs to help us identify the most valuable regional markets
Changes in operational indicators::
- ARPPU upgrade 27%
- Decrease in negative reviews 63%
- 2X increase in channel referral acquisition
What kind of team should choose GameShield?
After two years of practice, stoneCDN experts believe that the following types of gaming teams should prioritize Professional Game Shield:
3.1 Strong real-time games
- Action, FPS, MOBA and other latency-sensitive genres
- MMORPGs that require high-frequency packet transfers
- Casual game with real-time PVP elements
3.2 Globalized Operations Project
- Need for low-latency interconnection across continents
- Facing complex regional network environments (e.g., multiple ISPs in Southeast Asia)
- There are compliance requirements (e.g. GDPR, China, etc. insurance)
3.3 Economic entrepreneurial teams
- Need for cost-controlled security solutions
- Lack of specialized security operations and maintenance personnel
- Want to go live quickly without complex configurations
3.4 High-value game products
- Expected revenues of more than $10 million over the life cycle
- There are e-sports tournaments or groups of professional gamers
- Adoption of innovative business models (e.g., blockchain)
From "Necessary Evil" to "Competitive Advantage"
Looking back on these three years of security construction, my greatest realization is that game security protection has changed from a cost center that "has to be done" to a strategic asset that can create differentiated value. When our competitors are still worried about DDoS attacks a few times a month, we can plan large-scale operational activities with ease; when their players are lost due to the proliferation of plug-ins, our community is forming the reputation of "fair competition".
Whether to choose GameShield or a traditional high-defense CDN is ostensibly a choice of technical solution, but essentially an interpretation of the product philosophy of the gaming company - whether to consider security as a late stage of "patching", or as a fundamental part of the gaming experience? Our answer is obvious.
If you're struggling with this choice, my advice is: don't wait until the first Black Friday to regret it. There are some tuition fees that you really don't have to pay in person.