How Platforms Can Safekeep User Hardware Performance
Software developers have always had to balance out the features they implement with resources they require from one’s GPU, CPU and internet connection. Even the most useful piece of code on Earth would be irrelevant if it was too heavy to run, and a great service simply fail for eating up system resources.
In this article we’ll share some of our policies in dealing with performance optimization for our platform and apps, as well as what we found effective in encouraging performance-optimized products.
We’d also like to invite you to join our efforts and get $10 to participate in our bounty program! See more below.
It Starts With Commitment
Since performance optimization is a costly business, the first step any company needs to take is to commit to a high performance standard — products and features which do not meet that standard will simply not be released. This is a decision that affects all teams, changes the processes for testing and releasing new apps, and is the basis of any future investment in performance.
Once you’ve made the decision, it’s important to break it down to practical and measurable terms relevant to your product and audience. In Overwolf’s case, our goal is simple — safekeep gamer performance at all times and ensure their Framerate is unimpacted, their bandwidth is untouched and their system resources are efficiently used.
To meet this goal we monitor CPU, GPU and internet connection usage while our apps are running, and quickly fix any reported issue or performance drop across apps. This being such a high priority means performance fixes take precedence over implementing new features.
Earn Rewards For Your Help
Our commitment to performance optimization is not just empty words — we’re rewarding anyone who helps us spot and fix performance snags in our products. The current app being focused on is Rainbow 6 Siege Tracker, a great app which provides in-game statistics, enemy MMR and win rate prediction.
If you play Rainbow 6 and want to join our effort, all you need to do is spot a bug with the R6 Tracker app, report it via a support ticket, and get up to $10! This is not limited per person, so you can report multiple issues and get rewarded for each fix separately. Good hunting!
Path to a Smooth Release
When working with third party developers and creators who make apps for gamers, our commitment to performance has to be echoed by them. That means sharing our performance targets with them and guiding them on how to reduce the resources used by their new product.
We work hand in hand with creators to test repeatedly until their new creation is on par with our standards. In recent months this has become easier with improved documentation and development guides, but we still make sure to personally evaluate each app before release.
Even so, it’s pretty common for new apps and features to have some residual issues in the first few weeks — we can never test for every combination of OS and hardware, nor can we be sure different Internet Service Providers have the same bandwidth allocations in different parts of the world.
Therefore, release is just a starting point for optimization, and the process never really stops. Our support and community teams monitor every bit of feedback our users share, spot performance reports and immediately prioritize fixes at the top of our development schedule.
Performance Comes First
To summarize, we believe that as long as a product isn’t optimized, it doesn’t matter what value it provides — it must protect your gaming performance first. We made this our top priority because it’s your top priority as gamers, and we’d like your help as testers to ensure you are getting only top-notch apps that never hurt your FPS or network performance.
Thank you for continuously reporting issues, pointing out possible improvements and making our platform better every day — we promise to keep performance high in our priorities and dedicate the resources needed to solve any issues you encounter.
Game on!
