Bandai Namco Online Reduces Build Times 75% Using Incredibuild Cloud on AWS

Japan-based Bandai Namco Online has developed a variety of online games for PCs, smartphones, and video game consoles for both the Japanese and international markets. Founded in 2009, it is the online games division of Bandai Namco Group, a diverse global entertainment conglomerate with a market cap of $13.5 billion.

The company’s developers create its games using on-premises hardware located in its various offices and connected through a high-speed LAN. Since 2016, Bandai Namco Online has been using a virtual distributed processing infrastructure by AWS Partner Incredibuild to pool spare processor capacity to reduce game build times by 75 percent. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in staff working remotely, it adversely affected its build times. “Until the pandemic forced our developers to work remotely, each of their computers had been installed with Incredibuild,” says Yoshida Hirofumi, chief technology officer (CTO) at Bandai Namco Online. “But the network speeds from home weren’t fast enough, which affected our build times.”

Hirofumi was keen to not lose the competitive and productivity advantages gained from Incredibuild, and so he decided to try Incredibuild for Cloud on AWS, which uses cloud-based resources to provide compute power on-tap and allows developers working remotely to collaborate. “It became urgent that we regained our development efficiencies, so we adopted Incredibuild for Cloud,” says Hirofumi.

Bandai Namco Online’s developers use Unreal Engine’s C++ codes and shaders to create its games. When a game needs a bug fix, its entire code needs to be rebuilt, which before using Incredibuild, was a process that used to take about half a day. Using Incredibuild for Cloud, regardless of where the developers were working from, they could tap into vast amounts of compute power to reduce build times.

To provide compute capacity on demand, Incredibuild for Cloud uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. The Incredibuild infrastructure allows Bandai Namco Online’s developers to build their projects quickly, from anywhere. “It’s extremely important to be able to build on a quality-stable environment like the cloud so we can develop games remotely without harming the team's efficiency,” says Hirofumi. “Using Incredibuild for Cloud with AWS has improved efficiency by 50 percent for C++ and around 75–80 percent for shaders, which means it’s as fast for our developers building at home as it was on our office LAN.”

To optimize costs, where available, Incredibuild for Cloud uses Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which lets Bandai Namco Online run fault-tolerant workloads with an up to 90 percent reduction in cost. It also enables easy collaboration so developers can work together on projects regardless of their geographic location.

Bandai Namco Online now uses Incredibuild for Cloud for all its builds. This has transformed the company’s working culture by making hybrid working the norm. “We realized that this hybrid working approach has been extremely beneficial to our developers and employees,” says Hirofumi.

By reducing build times, Hirofumi says developers are also more productive because they are less likely to be distracted from their work. “Developers can lose focus when they have to wait after adjusting the code and running a build,” says Hirofumi. “The key to prolonging the focus of developers is to reduce build times as much as possible.”

Optimizing build times also improves the user experience because when a bug is discovered, it can be fixed and the new version of the game uploaded within hours. Hirofumi says he can’t imagine life without Incredibuild for Cloud on AWS. “We first adopted Incredibuild about 7 or 8 years ago and we use it for all our internal development projects,” says Hirofumi. “We have high hopes for the future with Incredibuild and AWS.”