Customer Stories / Games / United States

2024
Notorious Studios Logo

Notorious Studios Builds a Scalable Game Analytics Pipeline for Player Research on AWS

Learn how Notorious Studios, an indie video game startup, captures near real-time player insights using a scalable solution on AWS.

10 minutes

to deploy a game analytics pipeline

Overview

Playtesting is a critical step in the video game design process, helping developers tune and improve the player experience. Notorious Studios, a game studio, wanted to accelerate the design of its upcoming game, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, with game analytics. “We wanted to get real data on what our players were doing during our playtest, and validate design decisions early in development,” says David Perez, principal game play engineer at Notorious Studios.

To capture near real-time insights relating to player preferences and gameplay optimization, Notorious Studios built a scalable game analytics pipeline on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Notorious Studios - Loading Screen

Opportunity | Creating a Game Analytics Pipeline for Notorious Studios

Notorious Studios was formed by experienced game developers who have a passion for action-based fantasy games. Some of these developers came from Blizzard and worked on popular games such as Overwatch and World of Warcraft. Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, the company’s first title, is an online fantasy-action role-playing game. Players can select characters and classes to play as, with the option to go on solo adventures or play with their friends.

When Notorious Studios began playtests for Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, it didn’t have a structured solution for tracking player data. To get gameplay insights, its design team would consolidate data manually, which could take up to 3 days. Notorious Studios wanted to combine both qualitative and quantitative data in near real time. “Since we are a small team, we needed a solution that was simple to deploy, integrate, and maintain,” says Perez.

Scalability was also a factor, because the team expects that its playtests will grow as the game gets closer to release. So, Notorious Studios used Guidance for Game Analytics Pipeline on AWS, which provides a reference architecture and sample code that helps game developers implement a codified, modular, and serverless analytics pipeline that ingests telemetry events from game clients and backend services.

kr_quotemark

The top benefit is how simple it was to get our pipeline running. We can add and visualize data with ease by using Amazon QuickSight. ”

David Perez
Principal Game Play Engineer, Notorious Studios

Solution | Building a Modular Pipeline Using AWS CDK

The Guidance for Game Analytics Pipeline on AWS helped Notorious Studios align with AWS best practices and take a modular approach. The team used AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to define cloud application resources using familiar programming languages (see figure 1. Notorious Studios’ game analytics pipeline).

For cleaning and processing data, Notorious Studios uses AWS Glue, helping the company discover, prepare, and integrate all its data at any scale. To translate its data into Apache Parquet, Notorious Studios adopted Amazon Kinesis Firehose, which reliably loads near real-time streams into data lakes, warehouses, and analytics services. The team can then extract analytics using Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to process and analyze streaming data using standard SQL.

Notorious Studios also created data overlays using Amazon QuickSight, which powers data-driven organizations with unified business intelligence at hyperscale. Using these solutions, Notorious Studios customized a game analytics pipeline in 2 days and deployed it in under 10 minutes. “The top benefit is how simple it was to get our pipeline running,” says Perez. “We can add and visualize data with ease by using Amazon QuickSight.”

Architecture Diagram

Outcome | Balancing Game Design through Near Real-Time Insights

Using analytics from its pipeline, Notorious Studios has found trends in player engagement, such as popular classes and map regions. The company uses these insights to balance the game design and deliver features that players will enjoy. “When our designers have a new question, we can query past playtests and answer them with real data,” says Perez.

About Notorious Studios

Video game studio Notorious Studios is led by a group of experienced developers who work backward to deliver great gameplay and unite players within deep worlds.

AWS Services Used

Game Analytics Pipeline on AWS

This Guidance helps game developers implement a codified, modular, and serverless analytics pipeline that ingests telemetry events from game clients and backend services.

Learn more »

AWS Solutions Library

Vetted solutions and guidance for business and technical use cases.

Learn more »

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics enables you to quickly author SQL code that continuously reads, processes, and stores data in near real time.

Learn more »

Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight powers data-driven organizations with unified business intelligence (BI) at hyperscale.

Learn more »

More Games Customer Stories

Showing results: 9-12
Total results: 155

no items found 

  • Israel

    Reducing Anzu’s Cloud Costs by 50% on AWS

    Learn how intrinsic in-game advertising company Anzu unlocked better performance at a lower cost by migrating to AWS.
    2024
  • Ukraine

    GR8 Tech Achieves High Performance and Scalability with Data Center Migration to AWS

    GR8 Tech is based in Limassol, Cyprus, and has offices in the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The company provides services for iGaming businesses. GR8 Tech offers a comprehensive Sportsbook, iGaming Launch and iGaming Upgrade solutions.

    2023
  • Malta

    The Mill Adventure Delivers Personalized iGaming Using AWS

    Based in Malta, The Mill Adventure provides comprehensive and customizable, turnkey iGaming solutions. Its functionality includes everything from licenses and support for meeting compliance demands, to operations and business intelligence. Using AWS, the company built a serverless, business-to-business iGaming platform that can deliver a personalized and responsible experience for players. Since its inception, The Mill Adventure is on track to double its customer base year-on-year and has reduced the time it usually takes to onboard customers from months to weeks. Innovation happens quickly at the company with over 10,000 product updates released in just 3 years.
    2023
  • Sweden

    Kambi Increases Operational Efficiency by 50% Using AWS Cloud WAN

    Learn how Kambi in the sports betting industry centralized its network operations using AWS Cloud WAN.
    2024
1 39

Get Started

Organizations of all sizes across all industries are transforming their businesses and delivering on their missions every day using AWS. Contact our experts and start your own AWS journey today.