Riot Games Launch Project Stryker

First Broadcasting Center for Riot Games officially launched in Dublin

I had the pleasure of attending the official launch of Project Stryker, which in essence is the backend broadcasting project for Riot Games. The initial broadcast centre launch for this global project was in Dublin’s northside. It’s the first of three to complete Riot Games’ global integration of its new infrastructure into its product range and eSports offering.  

First up on the interview schedule was Allyson Gormley, General Manager of this new facility in north county Dublin. Allyson gave me an overview of what is been launched by Global eSports Production (Riot Games) as their flagship centre in Dublin. This centre is to act as a public backend broadcasting centre. The centre will take data streams from an event centre along with active direction from another geographically disparate centre into its project ‘TOC’. It will then process the backend production of received data streams into a finished product. A current project has a game feed from Riot Games’ Singapore centre hardwired via a ‘contribution kit’ box.

This box takes feeds into its global high-performance fibre optic network called ‘Riot Direct’ and routes it to the Dublin Center. The centre also takes feeds from the event ‘Director’, which for this project is based in Los Angles, USA. The feeds to Dublin are near real-time in milliseconds. As an engineer, I can say this is an impressive feat to do at scale. The learning and expertise gained at the Dublin site will be incorporated into the next centre based in Seattle, USA.  

Next up was Alex Rybalko, Broadcast Engineering Manager in the new facility who gave me further insights into the compute power of Riot Direct’s data centre. The focus on quality was noted with Cisco as a partner for data centre hardware and also software. Also of note was the new partnership Riot Games has just formed with AWS. Alex tells me that they intend to use an increasing amount of AWS services allowing for secure development of their digital footprint into the cloud.

Alex also remarked on how good team members along with good business partners create value in meeting the challenges of the centre’s daily operations. He also mentioned the continuous learning culture at Riot Games. This cultural orientation has allowed a decentralised R&D approach, permitting continuous development in all Project Stryker sites involving its team members in the process. It has yielded many benefits for Riot Games and its ability to achieve cutting-edge process and technology gains in broadcasting at scale.  

The final visit on my whistle-stop interview tour was with John Needham, President of eSports for Riot Games. John gave me insight into the longer-term direction for the centre, which will build on its initial success with a plan for Riot Games and eSports event production management. He mentioned their current TV series Arcane and the wish to turn the players of Riot Games into fans of their TV series productions.

The gaming exploits of its two primary characters in the game, Jinx and Vi will become animated TV celebs, which I found to be a refreshing change. Riot Games sees that deep connection between people and these new shows via its gaming and esports platforms as key to its future making it a global entertainment company.  

My final stop of the day was the actual launch itself. Officiating the happy event was the Irish Minister of Housing, Local Government and Heritage of Ireland, Darragh O’Brien. The event was kicked off with an entertaining introduction and explanation of the project’s superpowers that Riot Games is ready to integrate into its infrastructure. The ‘contribution’ box gained notoriety as a key piece of event kit that makes the magic happen and once again, the influence of team members, business partners and collaboration featured strongly throughout.

I cannot say what the future will bring in these uncertain times, but I would be shocked if a house full of creative talent does not diversify beyond the borders of its eSports and Gaming world into other areas. The infrastructure success that is Project Stryker brings only the first sign of this remarkable company’s true potential.

John Mulhall @johnmlhll is a writer with Irish Tech News for over 5 years and also a DevOps and Infrastructure Engineer specialising in cloud-related technologies. You can learn more about John at https://maolte.ie

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