Gamegoo Case Study

2014

Based in Beijing, Gamegoo is a leading developer of online games and entertainment. Since 2006, when the company was founded, it has produced role-playing and strategy games that include Hero, Huashan Mountain, Qi Xiong Zheng Ba, Kung Fu Journey to the West, and other games. The company has seen its revenues double over the last two years, thanks to its leading-edge technology, an international customer base, and creative game designs. Gamegoo employs 500 people and is funded by venture capital firm Tencent Holdings, Ltd.

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Using AWS provides our players with the best gaming experience, even in the face of explosive growth."

Qiu Du
Oversea Technical Director, Gamegoo

The Challenge

The rapid development of mobile devices has created rapid growth in the gaming industry, particularly in China. The country is seeing year over year growth of 135 percent in mobile phone gaming, according to the 2013 China Game Industry Report. As of June 2013, 279 million people in China were playing games on their mobile phones.

Gamegoo, a maker of popular games in China, wasn’t immune—and its games were attracting attention in other parts of Asia as well. For example, Gamegoo's Kung Fu Journey was attracting more than 50,000 new users a day from Southeast Asia. “Our on-premises servers were completely unable to support the players effectively,” says Qiu Du, Oversea Technical Director. “But to buy another server and configure it would have taken us a week’s time. We needed immediate help and dynamic elasticity if we were to capitalize on the incredible growth of mobile gaming in China.”

Why Amazon Web Services

Gamegoo, needing quick access to server resources, high availability, and high performance, decided to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) after careful research and analysis. “AWS has a good reputation in the industry and provides a wealth of cloud services,” Du says.

After making the decision to use AWS, Gamegoo engineers deployed its environment on AWS within two weeks. “Integration with our .NET and Linux platforms went very smoothly,” Du says.

The company is using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as a web server and application server, combined with Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to dynamically adjust to fluctuating loads and to improve resource utilization. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used worldwide for redundant storage and disaster recovery. Gamegoo uses Amazon CloudFront to store static files for its content delivery network (CDN), and dynamic content like database queries for low latency, high-speed data transfer.

Gamegoo also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with MySQL and SQL Server to automate performance monitoring. Amazon ElastiCache is used to improve application performance and data retrieval.

The Benefits

Gamegoo credits its use of AWS with improved game play, experiencing between near 100 percent availability and using elastic computing resources that swell as the number of players grows. “Using AWS provides our players with the best gaming experience, even in the face of explosive growth,” Du says. “We have been able to expand our services in Southeast Asia at the rate of 50,000 new players a day.”

The company is realizing significant savings each month by using the AWS Cloud instead of buying another server or moving operations to a colocation. “The amount of money we have saved by using AWS is considerable,” Du says.

“By using AWS, we can now deploy a server in half an hour, instead of one week,” Du says. “We will definitely be using more AWS services in the future.”


About Gamegoo

Based in Beijing, Gamegoo is a leading developer of online games and entertainment. Since 2006, when the company was founded, it has produced role-playing and strategy games that include Hero, Huashan Mountain, Qi Xiong Zheng Ba, Kung Fu Journey to the West, and other games.


AWS Services Used

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. 

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Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

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Elastic Load Balancing

Achieve fault tolerance for any application by ensuring scalability, performance, and security.

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Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally.

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