In-game purchases are the primary revenue stream for game development companies. Ensuring that users experience seamless transactions is critical to retaining them and preventing customer loss to competitors. Building a stable infrastructure to support integration with multiple payment systems is key. Artiom Kuciuk, Tech Lead at Greentube, shares his insights on overcoming challenges and creating robust payment solutions.
What are the key technical challenges you faced when integrating over 40 different payment systems? How difficult is it to create a unified integration that accommodates the varying standards and protocols used by these systems?
One of the biggest challenges lies in managing the diversity of standards and protocols across providers. Some still rely on legacy protocols like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or ISO 8583, designed for processing banking transactions, while others have transitioned to modern RESTful APIs, which offer more flexibility and efficiency. There are even providers using proprietary solutions or more complex integration schemes, so you have to be prepared for anything.
Adaptive architectures are essential for supporting both legacy and modern integrations. However, this increases implementation complexity and requires continuous testing to maintain compatibility. Additionally, providers often migrate from older integrations to newer ones, so ensuring a smooth transition between protocols is another challenge.
Different providers also demand varying levels of security. For example, in payment processing, security must be at its highest level. Protocols like 3D-Secure, which implements Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and technologies such as device fingerprinting are critical. Device fingerprinting identifies devices, and if a match is found with a previously registered fingerprint, some authentication steps can be skipped, enhancing user experience (UX) for repeat transactions.
To address all these details, thorough planning is crucial from the outset. Careful architectural planning helps avoid future rewrites, as even small oversights during this phase can lead to significant difficulties in scaling and maintaining the system.
How do you ensure high performance and system resilience, especially given the demands for instant transaction processing in online gaming? What approaches or technologies do you use to prevent delays and errors during high loads?
When deploying financial systems in a new project, we design them using a microservice architecture from the beginning. Modifying and scaling monolithic systems can be expensive and disruptive, as even minor changes can impact all integrations and cause cascading issues. In a microservice architecture, each type of integration is managed by a separate service. Even if one service fails or experiences a high load, other processes remain unaffected. This design ensures high system resilience and simplifies scaling due to the loose coupling of components.
We also host all our services in the cloud. Cloud technologies offer numerous advantages, including flexibility, reliability, and efficient resource management. One key benefit is auto-scaling, where resources are automatically scaled up to handle increased load—replicating services to distribute the demand. When the load decreases, the number of replicas is reduced, optimizing costs. Additionally, implementing caching technologies and focusing on code and algorithm optimization significantly reduces response times and infrastructure load.
These measures ensure our system maintains high performance and resilience. The system never reaches critical performance thresholds and remains fully auto-scalable, handling sudden spikes in traffic with ease.
How do you safeguard user data when integrating new payment systems? What protocols and tools do you use to ensure security?
For starters, we never store or process users' card data directly. Instead, we utilize tokenization, which replaces sensitive card data with unique tokens, eliminating the risk of compromising sensitive information. All transactions are transmitted using modern encryption protocols like TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3, which prevent data interception or unauthorized access.
Our system is configured to block communication over outdated and insecure protocols, such as SSL or earlier versions of TLS. We also implement End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) and enforce strict access controls to ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive information.
Regular security audits, vulnerability scans, and penetration tests allow us to proactively identify and address potential threats. By adhering to industry standards and leveraging cutting-edge security technologies, we can reliably protect user data during the integration of new payment systems.
For example, when working with payment cards, we strictly comply with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). This international standard governs data protection at every stage: collection, transmission, storage, and processing of transaction information.
What challenges arise when supporting payments across multiple regions?
Supporting payments in different regions comes with several challenges. First, there are diverse regulatory requirements and compliance standards related to data handling and financial transactions. For instance, implementing mechanisms to prevent funds from being transferred to third-party accounts is crucial to comply with AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations aimed at combating fraud and money laundering.
Second, strict data privacy laws, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe, impose additional requirements. For example, users can request the deletion of all their data from the system. Fulfilling such requests can be complicated because data may be stored across multiple providers and services. This necessitates coordinated processes and infrastructure integration to ensure complete compliance.
To address these challenges, payment systems must be designed to be flexible, modular, and scalable. This allows for adaptation to the specific requirements of each region and enables quick adjustments when providers change their infrastructure or new regulations emerge.
Considering your system supports both Greentube's online gaming and Novomatic Interactive's offline business, what are the key differences in payment processing requirements for these two areas?
Supporting offline business operations is not particularly unusual for us. Essentially, it's just another payment integration where the endpoints are physical terminals located in specific countries. The primary distinctions come from the local regulatory requirements governing financial transactions.
For example, offline systems often impose rules such as customer verification, maximum deposit limits, or withdrawal caps. These measures are crucial to prevent abuse, such as scenarios where a stolen card is used fraudulently.
While the core payment infrastructure remains similar, adapting to these regulatory constraints ensures the system operates securely and complies with the requirements of each region.
How do you ensure stable payment system performance during peak loads, such as major tournaments or promotional events? What approaches and tools help you scale to handle high transaction volumes?
Our primary strategy is leveraging a microservice architecture, which allows us to dynamically scale individual integration modules. This approach minimizes system load and reduces cloud resource costs by efficiently allocating resources where they are needed most. We also use distributed systems to manage transaction queues and caching, which enhances both resilience and data processing speed while minimizing response times.
Real-time monitoring of key metrics—including performance, transaction volume, and error rates—enables us to address anomalies proactively before they affect the system. Additionally, we employ real-time analytics and alert systems to preemptively prevent potential issues.
Regular load testing and simulations of peak events are another critical part of our process. By conducting stress tests and modeling high-activity scenarios in test environments, we ensure the system is always prepared to handle extreme loads.
What technological trends and innovations do you see as most promising for improving payment infrastructure in online gaming? How does Greentube plan to adapt to these changes?
We closely monitor technological innovations to stay ahead. One ongoing challenge with cryptocurrencies is verifying the source of funds to ensure they belong to the user. This makes crypto payments vulnerable to misuse for money laundering, and addressing this remains a key focus.
Mobile payment systems, such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, Air Cash, and Payconiq, continue to evolve rapidly. We actively track new entrants in this space and explore integrations that enable users to pay via mobile applications, further streamlining the payment experience.
AI-driven technologies are another transformative area. We use AI to detect suspicious transactions and enhance fraud monitoring. Our algorithms analyze user behavior, transaction patterns, and anomalies in real time, allowing us to identify potential threats and prevent fraudulent activity effectively.
In addition to refining our internal systems, we're expanding our offerings to external partners and developers. By launching our payment solution as a service, we enable partners to access over 40 payment systems via an open API. Our team manages all integration and support tasks, providing a seamless and scalable solution for other companies in the industry.
