Until now, the burden for managing sophisticated online games - managing individual game environments, tracking players' histories and statistics and matching players according to ability - has been devolved to the developer of each game. This makes development slower, more complex and more expensive, and also detracts from the gamers' experience due to lack of consistency and restrictions in the games available. As a result, the most active and intense gaming community, the PC gamers, have no complete online community or game hosting platform.

"GaimTheory is the first company to address the need of this rapidly growing market," said Keven Ellison, Vice President of Marketing for GaimTheory. "By integrating community, match-making and infrastructure, we have designed PurePressure to be the most comprehensive online gaming platform for PC gamers. The end result - enhancing the gamer's experience."

GaimTheory expects to revolutionize the quality of the online experience for end-users. It has an equally powerful value proposition for publishers. GaimTheory's platform will shoulder the burden of integration and help assure those publishers that there will be adequate capacity for the customers of their games. With the GaimTheory platform, publishers will be able to develop games faster and receive comprehensive data. Also, GaimTheory will partner with publishers to promote their games through tournaments and other events. To demonstrate the power of their offering, GaimTheory has launched the site www.purepressure.com, hosting several of the most popular First Person Shooter (FPS) games.

The key to PurePressure™ is GINA™ - Gamers Interactive Network Assistant. GINA is an artificial intelligence that communicates with users, keeps track of their buddies and teams, schedules tournaments, and most importantly, learns a gamer's skill over time and matches that gamer with similarly skilled gamers. GINA's administrative capabilities range from the simplest task of matching two similar players into a bout to organizing an extremely complex 64 team tournament which can stretch to hundreds of gamers and dozens of matches. Existing tournament solutions rely on manual processes, need lots of people and take weeks to set up tournaments, a process that GINA can do in minutes. GINA can also administer several tournaments across several games simultaneously.

The need for an infrastructure solution that can easily scale to accommodate rapid growth in gamers and that provides 24/7 availability is clear. GaimTheory selected Oracle Database because of its proven reliability, scalability and performance and because of its low overall cost of ownership. The company deployed Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition; and, with eyes firmly on the future, has implemented Oracle Real Application Clusters to provide the reliability and scalability needed to support future demand.

"The high availability we get courtesy of Oracle Real Application Clusters enabled us to design our database architecture with no single point of failure," said Steve Tulk, President and Chief Operating Officer of GaimTheory. "The scalability of Real Application Clusters allows us to add additional horsepower incrementally while limiting downtime."

"GINA is architected to support over a million users," continued Ellison. "We definitely see that the infrastructure to support this complexity with the necessary reliability and performance has to be a grid computing environment. As well as offering GINA's unique capabilities, PurePressure is a web 2.0 environment, with major social networking content alongside its gaming capabilities. Grid computing is the obvious way to deal with the resultant complexity and reliably deliver the rich interface and content which is the hallmark of web 2.0. Oracle is the only vendor who can provide us with a technically capable, cost-effective solution now with a credible path to a grid-based environment."

About GaimTheory
Based in Los Angeles, California, GaimTheory is a technology driven company dedicated to the advancement of artificial intelligence through applied game dynamics. For more information about GaimTheory, visit our Web site http://www.gaimtheory.com or our technology showcase at http://www.purepressure.com.