Running Reports in Milliseconds Using Amazon QuickSight with Bandai Namco Mobile

Bandai Namco Mobile is based in Barcelona and provides marketing support for popular anime F2P mobile games published by its parent company, Bandai Namco Entertainment. F2P mobile games increase their revenue by acquiring engaged players that make in-game purchases. Mobile game providers analyze data—including advertising metrics, community engagement, and in-game measurements—to fine-tune marketing strategies with the goal of attracting new players and reducing customer churn. With its previous marketing analytics solution, Bandai Namco Mobile’s marketing team used direct application programming interface calls to third-party sources whenever marketing data experts needed data. However, this workflow was time consuming for large amounts of data and wasn’t effective for advanced workflows, such as machine learning (ML) and historical insight. Data experts on the marketing team also needed to submit thousands of requests per day to update historical data, which often caused time-outs.

After looking at other cloud providers, Bandai Namco Mobile chose AWS because it supported the studio’s marketing use cases cost effectively and with minimal overhead. In 2021, Bandai Namco Mobile built a data pipeline using AWS services, such as AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service for discovering, preparing, and integrating data at scale. In under 1 month, the marketing team implemented the infrastructure it needed to create a functioning serverless pipeline in production that powers analytics engineering with dbt, ML, and integration with business intelligence systems. “Our pipeline runs daily, and we have not seen a need for major changes in our serverless AWS implementation. We spend our time solving use cases using analytics, ML, and dashboards,” says Ayala.

The team has continued to enhance the pipeline over time, including migrating the studio’s business intelligence from another provider to Amazon QuickSight, which powers data-driven organizations with unified business intelligence at hyperscale, in 2022. “We wanted a tool that is tailored to our needs and flexible enough to support the analytics that we want while reducing the overhead of maintaining infrastructure and keeping costs at a reasonable scale,” says Ayala. “We found that Amazon QuickSight was an excellent way to go for us.”

To run effective campaigns and gather insights to improve its marketing strategy, Bandai Namco Mobile needs to integrate, combine, and transform data from various sources. The studio estimates that overall, it transforms more than 500 tables to run its reports. It stores data using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere. Using AWS services, the marketing team can run advanced analytics on campaigns at a granular level and optimize costs using ML models. “If the marketing team has a question about marketing performance, it’s simple to go to a dashboard and see the answer in milliseconds using AWS services and Amazon QuickSight, rather than having to wait for queries to complete or going to multiple dashboards from third parties,” says Ayala.

With a pipeline built on AWS that integrates modern analytics engineering tools such as dbt, Bandai Namco Mobile has a single source of truth for its marketing data, which increases reliability and trust. Data experts don’t need to spend time troubleshooting discrepancies and can have more confidence in marketing analytics. The studio also automated checks for issues so that data experts are notified quickly and can resolve issues if third-party data isn’t appearing as expected or if changes broke certain transformations. “Automation helps each of our 20 users get reports from Amazon QuickSight and build insights. Now our team can spend more time understanding the data and having discussions focused on what’s happening rather than copying and pasting data and validating that everything matches up across sources,” says Ayala. “It makes work simpler.”

Using AWS services, Bandai Namco Mobile off-loads the heavy lifting and pays only for what it uses. The studio sees significant cost efficiencies by building its solution on AWS and estimates spending 5–10 times less than its competitors for a similar solution. A portion of those cost savings comes from included features, such as Amazon QuickSight SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine), a robust in-memory engine used to rapidly perform advanced calculations and serve data. Using Amazon QuickSight SPICE, Bandai Namco Mobile can load tens of millions of rows without paying for a more expensive memory database. “Our solution built on AWS gets the job done,” says Ayala. “We save a lot of time on managing infrastructure, our customers are happy because we focus on delivering value, and we are saving money.”