It's easy to put up a web site with some static marketing pages, but once your system grows to include user registration, real-time messaging, gameplay interaction, e-commerce, micro-transactions, user generated content, metrics, analytics, and localization to different languages, it's no longer so easy.

A successful game needs to merge "game networking" and "web networking," which have traditionally been different disciplines. This session uses the IMVU service back-end as a case study to illustrate pros and cons of various approaches. IMVU has scaled this back-end to serve many millions of active users across many languages.