AEXLAB is a VR technology company based out of Miami, Florida. The studio began developing VAIL VR in 2017 wanting to make the world's most competitive VR first-person shooter. Throughout its development, the studio has been able to build a community of over 50,000 passionate VR enthusiasts.
VAIL VR is a virtual reality multiplayer shooter. Emphasizing tactical gunplay, high-caliber combat, and collaborative teamwork. Find it on Steam or in the Meta Quest Store.
The Challenges
VAIL VR by AEXLAB was faced with the reality that their game backend was being deprecated and the game was already live with thousands of passionate players in early access. AEXLAB needed to find a solution and completely migrate within 10 weeks.
This solution needed to provide server orchestration, matchmaking, and server browser capabilities and allow them to seamlessly migrate players with minimal downtime.
With a small team, AEXLAB sought the help of the Companion Group, a team of highly talented multiplayer game developers, to help them find and migrate to another solution.
“We invested a lot in our options analysis by partnering with the Companion Group to fully explore all our options. They recommended AccelByte because they offered the most comprehensive set of well-documented and reliable services with the least amount of risk.”
- Albert Ovadia, CTO, AEXLAB
The Solutions
Working against a tight deadline, Companion Group and AEXLAB quickly combined forces and started the whole stack migration to AccelByte Gaming Services (AGS) leveraging AccelByte’s comprehensive and battle-tested set of core platform features.
“I often forget that VAIL VR is powered by AccelByte because it just works. It works across multiple platforms; it's nice to not have to think about it.”
- Albert Ovadia, CTO, AEXLAB
Looking for more details? Download the full story below.
Result Overview
In only 1.5 months AEXLAB and Companion Group were able to migrate the core backend services and multiplayer game servers with no disruption to their existing players and were excited to open VAIL VR to the rest of their fans worldwide on February 15th. Using Accelbyte, AEXLAB was able to launch with a working backend 4-12 times faster than if they’d built it in house.
“For a studio maybe working on eight or more titles at a time in the same genre, I could imagine an in-house solution would maybe worth considering. For a studio like ours, making VR technologies, and showcasing them in our title VAIL VR, it would be untenable. It would have added 6-18 months with high risk. In our case, to build and maintain similar services would've been multiples in maintenance alone. To build something custom and small, for us, by us, would've easily taken many people, which we'd rather focus and invest in VR technology and VR games where we have our edge. AB has their edge, so we let them do what they do”
- Albert Ovadia, CTO, AEXLAB
Interested in learning all the technical details? In our full story discover how we help developers provide cross-platform entitlements, link player accounts across platforms and storefronts, securely save and store player progression, customize matchmaking, leverage a fully customizable dashboard and query-ready data warehouse, and more.
