The latest in a string of recent moves by the Android-maker to shift focus towards the gaming sector is a partnership between Google Cloud and SuperGaming to make the Indian gaming startup’s proprietary game engine, SuperPlatform, available to developers globally.

The search engine giant’s cloud division announced on Thursday that, as part of its partnership, it will make the gaming engine from the startup with its headquarters in Pune available to developers all over the world to assist them in managing their live operations, matchmaking, player progression and data, analytics, server scaling, and merchandising. These tools are made to aid businesses in maintaining, improving, and expanding their gaming operations.

Millions of people have downloaded SuperGaming’s mobile games like MaskGun, Silly Royale, and Tower Conquest, which employ the same gaming engine as the official PAC-MAN game for mobile devices.

SuperPlatform was initially created by SuperGaming to power its own games, then in 2019 it began to be licenced to other developers.

The two firms aren’t stranger to one another. SuperGaming originally relied on AWS for its cloud needs, but moved to Google Cloud a couple of years ago after seeing advantages including “a significant amount of savings,” SuperGaming co-founder and chief executive Roby John told TechCrunch in an interview.

That move put wheels in motion to make the platform available via Google Cloud as an independent software vendor for developers, said John. “I’m very excited to bring our platform to Google Cloud, which powers 70% of our top customers already,” he added.

Although SuperPlatform will continue to be available on both AWS and Azure, SuperGaming will prefer Google Cloud as a result of the relationship, he said.

John claimed that SuperGaming and Google Cloud engineers had been collaborating closely before discussions about a potential partnership to use the cloud platform for the upcoming battle royale game Indus. He claimed that the teams on both sides shared insights that helped the partnership develop very naturally.

“The partnership is beyond just saying, okay, here’s computers and infrastructure and all the rest. It’s about saying, how can we come collectively together and with the business objective of succeeding,” said Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India, in the joint conversation.

AWS and Azure, rivals of Google Cloud, do provide native liveOps solutions for game developers that enable them to run their games as a service and obtain real-time telemetrics. However, Google Cloud appears to use SuperGaming’s expertise in addition to its platform to make some differences.

SuperGaming has so far raised $6.8 million, with $5.5 million coming in through a Series A round last year. It counts Texas-based Skycatcher, Tokyo’s Akatsuki Entertainment Technology Fund, Kirkland’s 1UpVentures, and BAce Capital, which is backed by the Ant Group, among its investors.

“It’s always about developers, or it’s about players. And this partnership allows us to influence both,” said Bedi.

TowerConquest: Metaverse Edition, a free-to-play Web3 game that the business also released, will reportedly run on Google Cloud alongside its current games and the new Indus.

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