AWS for Games Blog
Hypermonk Games transforms mobile game development with data powered by AWS
Building mobile games that stand out in a fast-growing market requires more than just great gameplay. Having cracked the code on data-driven innovation powered by AWS, Turkish games studio Hypermonk Games has developed casual racing and simulation titles that have racked up over 100 million downloads to date.
The company is refining its development approach with Orange, an analytics infrastructure designed and built in-house using proprietary tools and third-party cloud solutions. Developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Partner Clerion using AWS services, Orange delivers powerful player insights. With it, the Hypermonk Games team can better understand player engagement, drop off, in-game economy patterns, and other data that inform design and monetization decisions across titles.
“Creating satisfying game mechanics, high-fidelity visuals, and rewarding progression systems runs in our DNA, and our development philosophy focuses on scalable core gameplay and innovative content loops that drive engagement and retention. We’re also continuously investing in an analytics-driven approach to deliver non-linear, personalized experiences to stay competitive,” explained Aycan Sayar, senior backend developer, Hypermonk Games.
“Orange was the next logical step in advancing our user acquisition, live ops, and monetization efforts. It provides granular, real-time tracking of user-level spend and all in-game events, and connects ad revenue, UA costs, and in-app purchase data for every title,” he continued. “This enables us to optimize ROI, improve LTV predictions, and make data-driven decisions rapidly across the entire game portfolio. Thanks to AWS, and with Clerion, we ensured the infrastructure that we built is well-architected.”
Unlocking integrated insights with a unified approach
Global reach, outstanding visual game quality, and player experiences that feel hyper-realistic yet accessible have contributed to the success of Hypermonk Games since its launch in 2021. Its games combine console-quality visuals with non-linear player progression and let players advance at their own pace. Highway Overtake, Dyno 2 Race, Drift 2 Drag, and Count and Bounce represent some of the studio’s most popular titles.
Image 1: Screenshot from Highway Overtake, a mobile racing game by Hypermonk Games.
Before Orange, Hypermonk Games relied heavily on multiple third-party tools to collect and analyze player data, which informed development choices. This fragmented approach slowed the analysis process and limited cross-team insight sharing. It also made data tracking and visualization highly inefficient. So, the Hypermonk Games team began exploring how it could create a centralized business intelligence (BI) infrastructure to meet its unique needs. The aim was to unlock integrated insights for growth, design, and development teams—with full control, direct event tracking, and customizable dashboards.
An on-premises deployment would require renting a server and installing databases and APIs to collect user device data, store it, and create dashboards from scratch. Instead, the company opted for a serverless cloud approach with AWS.
“We knew AWS could handle most of the deployment and maintenance processes, leaving us only to write business logic, which is indispensable for a 24-person team like ours,” noted Sayar. “Thanks to the abundance of serverless solutions from AWS and their proven track record, we were confident that adding them to our infrastructure was the right choice.”
Enlisting the help of AWS and Clerion, Hypermonk Games was able to sidestep typical server provisioning, management, and maintenance challenges. This decision positioned the team to rapidly implement the core components of Orange, while the scalable, pay-as-you-go nature of AWS provided them a way to experiment on a low budget and scale as the workload increased.
“Offloading a majority of our infrastructure workload to managed, serverless services from AWS significantly reduced ramp-up time,” explained Sayar. “It helped free our team’s time to focus entirely on product development and innovation. We were also able to leverage cost-optimized pricing models.”
Using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), the team was able to deploy the services they wanted into Orange. They could define each in the project repository and implement both service connections and configurations rapidly.
“We knew if we used an on-premises system, we’d have to set up and run all these processes one by one on the server, which would have been too time-intensive,” Sayar continued. “With AWS, we were able to quickly bring our vision to life with the flexibility to scale.”
Leveraging data to improve game development and design
Orange makes the collection of user-level data through the Hypermonk Games SDK intuitive, providing micro and macro player analysis. It supports metrics, such as core game analytics, event-based and real-time data, A/B testing, and remote config management. The infrastructure also automates discrepancy detection between ad revenue sources, and creative upload and distribution, as well as competitor ad scraping through integrated APIs.
Aggregation of this data gives the development team insights that it can leverage to rapidly test and optimize features, ads, and monetization workflows, while detecting and solving revenue discrepancy issues in real-time. It also helps to reduce iteration time, boost efficiency, and improve data-driven decision-making on everything from user acquisition spending to product design.
With Orange architected in the cloud, network APIs from advertising, acquisition, and in-app purchase partners like Applovin, Meta, Mintegral, Revenue Cat, TikTok, Unity, and others can be seamlessly integrated. The Hypermonk Games team can compare internal data against partner-provided insights to carry out advanced analysis. They can also control and analyze the data with their mobile measurement partner, Adjust, to track campaign ad data and user installs.
Since AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon EventBridge power Orange, the team can check the data faster and in a more refined way on its dashboard. Orange collects and saves the data from these APIs daily, and the Hypermonk Games team processes it, querying with Amazon Athena to find the data it needs.
The technology fueling Orange
Orange utilizes AWS Lambda for serverless compute and Amazon Kinesis for data ingestion, with Amazon DynamoDB serving as the primary data store. With the support of Clerion, Hypermonk Games developed a cost-optimized architecture that adheres to AWS best practices and is aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Among their recommendations, Clerion encouraged Hypermonk Games to adopt Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).
“Clerion’s deep expertise with AWS ultimately contributed to the design of a more cost-effective, reliable system that gave us the confidence to move forward with certainty,” explained Sayar.
Additional architecture enhancements included the implementation of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) lifecycle policies and automation of tier transitions based on object modification timestamps. These improvements provided them with a way to move infrequently accessed data to Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Glacier Deep Archive, resulting in approximately 60% savings on object storage costs.
“On the DynamoDB side, we migrated from on-demand to provisioned capacity mode. By analyzing a year’s worth of usage metrics, we defined peak and target capacity units, achieving roughly 50% cost savings on our database operations,” added Sayar.
Expanding on a solid foundation to drive future innovation
Orange has empowered the Hypermonk Games team to be more agile, accurate, and data-driven, while powering faster growth and the development of higher-quality games. Moving forward, the team is focused on advancing the dashboard behind it. The goal is to enable full control over required ad network integrations and management directly through the tool.
The Hypermonk Games Team also wants to evolve Orange to support the internal storage and management of key game state configurations from the client side. To this end, the next phase of innovation will take advantage of artificial intelligence.
Sayar concluded, “We’re working to simplify dashboard usage and elevate data analysis insight as we scale Orange. This way, we can make it more user-friendly and capable of uncovering hidden aspects of more complex analytical data. AI and ML [machine learning] services from AWS, along with rapidly developing models, will be instrumental to this process, helping us to build an even more scalable, reliable system.”
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