gumi Asia Levels Up Its Gaming Experience and Unlocks AI Skills with AWS Training and Certification

gumi Asia, a subsidiary of Japan-based gumi Inc., was established in April 2012 as a mobile game developer and publisher based in Singapore. Notably, the company is the creator of The Alchemist Code, a mobile strategy role-playing game for iOS and Android devices. It is also known for co-developing two Final Fantasy Brave Exvius titles (FFBE and War of the Visions) with Square Enix, a renowned video game production enterprise and entertainment conglomerate.

Since its launch, gumi Asia has relied on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide essential infrastructure to reach mobile gamers around the world. For example, the company has used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to provide high performance, scalability, and simplified management, all while optimizing costs.

With the global mobile gaming market expected to be worth over $214 billion by 2028, gumi Asia has several new game projects on the horizon, and it wanted to focus on staying competitive by building in-house AWS skills. To this end, the company set out to equip its development teams with training on AWS best practices to optimize their use of AWS services while staying current with the pace of AWS services launched. Simon Nishi McCorkindale, general manager at gumi Asia, says, "Even senior engineers with years of AWS experience may still have opportunities for enhancing effectiveness and efficiency in their work."

Moreover, gumi Asia identified training as a motivation booster, especially with the global demand for developers rising by 50 percent in recent years. McCorkindale observed that in addition to improving skills, training could also serve as a bonding tool for remote employees. McCorkindale comments, "With many employees working remotely, we saw training as a means to strengthen their connection with the company and support our retention strategy."

To begin its training journey, the company collaborated with its local AWS Training and Certification team to conduct an AWS Learning Needs Analysis. This helped align suitable courses with business objectives and the interests of gumi Asia's engineers. McCorkindale recalls, "We sought feedback from engineers, which turned out to be a fruitful endeavor for everyone. Armed with this insightful data, we worked with AWS to develop a comprehensive training plan comprising five distinct courses."

gumi Asia started the training with the AWS Technical Essentials instructor-led course, which helps engineers choose AWS services based on their needs. The team of developers then completed a series of in-depth AWS Classroom Training courses, including Security Engineering on AWS, DevOps Engineering on AWS, Advanced Architecting on AWS, and Advanced Developing on AWS. These courses were each delivered virtually alongside a one-day AWS Jam, which is an immersive experiential learning session that incorporates simulated real-world use-cases. The sessions offered hands-on challenges curated to align with the classroom topics and the AWS services covered. McCorkindale shares, "The AWS Jam session embedded in the courses were instrumental in knowledge retention and presented our developers with real-life scenarios to apply their newfound skills." gumi Asia's developers completed the whole set of courses, most of which were held remotely over three days, within three months. Thomas Schobben, technical manager at gumi Asia, comments, "As someone with a frontend background, the Advanced Architecting on AWS course has been a game-changer, expanding my skillset and helping me to work more effectively with our backend team."