GameVault: A Secure Full-Stack Multi-Vendor Digital Gaming Distribution Platform with AI-Driven Support and Real-Time Analytics

Abstract

The digital gaming industry has experienced exponential growth globally, yet India lacks a dedicated, indigenous digital distribution platform tailored for local developers and consumers. Existing international platforms such as Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG impose high revenue cuts, offer limited localization, and provide minimal support for regional pricing and Indian payment methods. This paper presents GameVault, a secure, scalable, full-stack multi-vendor digital gaming distribution platform designed specifically for the Indian market. GameVault employs a MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) stack architecture enhanced with CDN-based asset delivery, JWT token authentication, role-based access control (RBAC), and WebSocket-driven real-time analytics. The platform features dedicated modules for vendors, users, and administrators. An AI-powered chatbot integrated through NLP frameworks provides automated customer support. Performance evaluation demonstrates that GameVault achieves API response times of 142 ms, supports up to 10,000 concurrent users with sub-200 ms latency, and delivers security threat prevention rates exceeding 98.6% across all tested attack vectors. The proposed revenue model allocates 80% to developers, substantially higher than the industry standard 70%. Experimental results confirm that the platform offers competitive performance, robust security, and a scalable architecture suitable for emerging digital gaming markets.

Introduction

The text presents GameVault, a full-stack, multi-vendor digital game distribution platform designed specifically for the Indian gaming ecosystem. While the global gaming industry has shifted to digital distribution through platforms like Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG, India still lacks a dedicated platform that addresses the needs of local developers. Existing platforms often impose high revenue-sharing fees, provide limited visibility for regional content, lack localized pricing, and offer minimal developer-centric support.

To address these challenges, GameVault is built using the MERN stack and incorporates CDN-optimized game delivery, role-based access control (RBAC), JWT authentication, signed URLs, real-time analytics through WebSockets, and an AI-powered chatbot for customer support. The platform features dedicated dashboards for users, vendors, and administrators, secure lifetime game libraries, and a more favorable 80:20 revenue-sharing model, allowing developers to retain 80% of their earnings.

The literature review highlights that although existing research covers topics such as digital game distribution, multi-vendor systems, cloud scalability, DRM, authentication, and AI chatbots, there is no integrated solution tailored for the Indian gaming market. GameVault bridges these gaps by combining secure game distribution, analytics, AI support, and developer-focused revenue policies into a single platform.

The proposed system adopts a microservices-based architecture consisting of three layers:

• Client Layer: React.js interfaces for users, vendors, and administrators.
• Service Layer: Express.js API gateway with independent microservices handling authentication, game management, payments, analytics, and AI chatbot services.
• Data Layer: MongoDB, cloud storage, CDN edge servers, and WebSocket servers for scalable storage, secure game delivery, and real-time communication.

The paper also introduces mathematical models to evaluate API response time, CDN delivery latency, and effective download speed, demonstrating the platform's scalability and performance optimization. Overall, GameVault aims to provide a secure, scalable, and developer-friendly digital game distribution ecosystem that supports India's rapidly growing gaming industry while addressing its unique technical and economic challenges.

Conclusion

This paper presented GameVault, a secure, scalable, and developer-friendly full-stack multi-vendor digital gaming distribution platform designed to address critical gaps in the Indian digital gaming ecosystem. The platform integrates MERN stack architecture with CDN-optimized delivery, a four-layer security framework, WebSocket-driven real-time analytics, and an AI-powered chatbot. Mathematical modeling and experimental evaluation demonstrate competitive performance across all tested dimensions. GameVault achieves API response times of 142 ms (Eq. 1), maintains sub-200 ms latency at 10,000 concurrent users with a scalability factor of 6.06x (Eq. 8), and delivers multi-layer security threat prevention rates of 99.999% (Eq. 6). The AI chatbot achieves a weighted resolution rate of 88.9% (Eq. 9) with 1.8 second average response time. The 80/20 revenue model (Eq. 10) offers substantially better terms for developers. Future work will focus on expanding mobile application support through native Android and iOS interfaces, integrating advanced recommendation engines using deep collaborative filtering, implementing blockchain-based transaction verification for enhanced transparency, and supporting multi-language localization. Additionally, integration with cloud gaming services and support for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) will be explored.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Kanak Thool, Anita Yadav. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.