Huuuge Games Focuses on New Titles Thanks to the Simplicity of AWS

Huuuge Games stays focused on developing new titles and improving the gaming experience using AWS. The company has built popular massively multiplayer online games, such as Huuuge Casino. Amazon EKS automates management tasks, while game play is analyzed using Amazon EMR and Amazon Neptune.

Huuuge Games is a global mobile game developer and publisher. The company consistently ranks as one of the 50 top-grossing mobile games developers in the world and is one of the fastest growing mobile games developers in terms of revenue, according to App Annie.

Huuuge Games specializes in free-to-play digital games, available via mobile and fixed internet platforms. Millions of people play its games globally with users from more than 190 countries.

To support large numbers of players at the same time, multiplayer games need a lot of compute capacity. Huuuge Games recognized that an on-premises infrastructure would be too expensive and time-consuming to manage.

Instead, the organization chose Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provided the scalable capacity, simplified management, and global reach for Huuuge Games’ titles. With no need to invest upfront, Huuuge Games quickly got its first title, Allies in War, to market—followed by its “breakthrough” game, Huuuge Casino.

As Huuuge Games’ titles gained more success, the demands on the AWS infrastructure grew. However, Huuuge Games wanted to concentrate on games development rather than dedicate resources to figuring out how to scale the infrastructure in the most effective way.

To avoid this, the company began working with AWS Enterprise Support and a Technical Account Manager (TAM) to plan its cloud development strategy. Rafal Grembowski, software architect at Huuuge Games, says, “We’re always trying to improve our infrastructure, but it can be challenging when you’re so focused on developing games. With AWS Enterprise Support, our TAM will keep us up to date on the latest services that could deliver the performance and manageability enhancements we strive for.”

As part of the improvement process, Huuuge Games took advantage of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which automates infrastructure patching and other management tasks. Grembowski says, “Amazon EKS has lowered the overhead of system maintenance, which means we can dedicate more resources to what we do best—creating engaging multiplayer social casino games.”

Besides enabling Huuuge Games to concentrate on games development, AWS is also helping the company to enrich the gaming experience of its current titles. Gaining insight to do this requires analyzing 1.5 billion events a day—an activity that could involve extensive platform tuning and monitoring of a big data infrastructure.

However, by using cloud data platform Amazon EMR, Huuuge Games had reduced that burden. Grembowski says, “It’s easy to use and gives us the reliability we need.”

Huuuge Games analyzes gamers’ journeys to understand how to make its games even better. To overcome potential issues around scaling and administrating the infrastructure to do this, the company uses Amazon Neptune, a fully managed graph database service.

“The software is out there to help you improve the gaming experience, but the management time for all the infrastructure isn’t—that’s why AWS is a key service provider for us,” says Grembowski.

Today, Huuuge Games titles powered by AWS attract almost 1 million daily users. With no downtime impacting performance, users playing Huuuge Games titles for the first time get the kind of experience that makes them return.

Says Grembowski, “Our decision to focus on multiplayer social casino titles in 2014 has proved to be a successful strategy. Using AWS was a smart move for us because we have the tools to build and deliver great experiences to gamers.”