Why Assembla
"We considered hosting ourselves, both in cloud (AWS) and locally. As a small team, we didn't want the burden of having to maintain such a critical service. Production-level reliability/redundancy, monitoring, logging etc are all difficult and time-consuming, and we didn't want to take time away from developers to look after Perforce."
The best Perforce hosting solution
Given that Two Point Studios has a small team supporting a large userbase, the founders wanted to laser-focus developers’ time on supporting development of the games and point releases. Being attentive to the user community’s needs was another key priority. Therefore, hosting a reliable VCS on a hosting platform that supported hands-off maintenance was seen as a key objective.
Uptime guarantee
An uptime guarantee that would be suitable for the Studio’s game distribution plan, which included distributing live point updates with Steam and other platforms.
Monitoring and logging
Monitoring and logging capabilities which would have required complex add-ons or standalone product additions if the team had opted for another VCS solution.
Fast and reliable server
The Two Point team was already familiar with Assembla’s products.
As Ben said: “I had been part of a team using Assembla (hosting SVN) before starting Two Point Studios, and found the server to be very fast and reliable." Most of the team’s knowledge with Assembla products, however, was concentrated on Perforce. Hymers describes Assembla as being “head and shoulders” above any competing Perforce hosting solutions.
Optimized workflow
Assembla remains enormously popular among game studios due to the large binary files that are part and parcel of normal workflows for these products. For Two Point Studios this also gave Assembla Perforce the obvious edge over Git. “We considered Git but it just wasn’t optimized for our workflow,” according to Hymers.