Scaling to Support 4 Million Players at 70% Lower Cost Using AWS Serverless Solutions with ZigZa

ZigZa is a global gaming company that is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with offices in the United States and 43 million players worldwide. Its flagship mobile games, Evertale and Tokyo Debunker, are hosted on AWS, and Tokyo Debunker has been a particular success, seeing 44 percent growth in 2024. Both games center on events that happen at certain times of the day—for example, the Raid feature in Tokyo Debunker, where players can work together to defeat bosses—which create bursts of demand.

The company adopted a serverless architecture on AWS to minimize operational overhead and infrastructure management. “We wanted to be mostly focused on our business logic, players, and mobile app,” says Tom Delorenzi, chief technology officer at ZigZa. As part of this move, ZigZa began using AWS Lambda, a service to run code without thinking about servers or clusters. However, it was challenging for the company’s caching database to keep up with the spikes in demand because nodes were required to handle too many concurrent network connections, and ZigZa had to throttle the load to avoid the game going offline.

ZigZa needed a different caching solution, so the company’s AWS account manager put ZigZa in touch with Momento. The partner’s solutions, which are natively serverless on AWS, offered ZigZa the scalability to serve thousands of concurrent AWS Lambda functions and a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). ZigZa first adopted Momento Cache to power the chat feature in its game Evertale. It took less than 1 week to integrate Momento’s solution into the game. “Momento Cache was handling anything related to the chat system, and it was a big success,” says Delorenzi.

When ZigZa began working on its next game, Tokyo Debunker, it implemented Momento Cache and Momento Topics, a publish-subscribe solution, as part of its AWS architecture from the earliest development. “Momento drove the architecture of the Tokyo Debunker server such that we were able to enhance some features of Evertale more elegantly and efficiently,” says Delorenzi. Tokyo Debunker went live in April 2024 and became one of the most popular free adventure games upon its release.

ZigZa can now handle over 1 billion cache requests daily to serve millions of global players. “Using AWS serverless architecture and Momento, we can scale as much as we need,” says Delorenzi. “Scalability has been everything we could have wanted.” Players of Tokyo Debunker are directly connected to Momento Cache and Momento Topics (see figure 1). ZigZa uses both solutions to power near real-time player interactions by pushing notifications to players with low latency—response times of less than 10 milliseconds.

With the push notification system and other optimizations, the game takes less bandwidth for players. And the system is designed so that all players can receive updates during the nightly events at the same moment or as near to real time as possible. “We performed testing ahead of time with the Momento team to be able to send out all the data to all the players quickly so that we have a level playing field,” says Delorenzi.

By implementing Momento Cache, ZigZa has unlocked the benefits of a serverless architecture and reduced the TCO for its in-memory data store for chat by 30 percent. With Tokyo Debunker, ZigZa added a second game hosted on AWS. And by using a serverless architecture, its total costs increased by only 50 percent rather than doubling as could be expected when doubling its workload.

Using AWS serverless technologies, ZigZa no longer requires server maintenance for its databases, caches, or application servers, thus reducing operational costs by 70 percent. The new architecture using Momento also removed the need for WebSockets, which reduced complexity and operational overhead for the game. “There’s not much management for us to do,” says Delorenzi. “When we moved to AWS Lambda and Momento, we stopped having to maintain machines and rebuild caches.” At the same time, the game is highly available, with virtually no downtime and no issues related to caching since launch.

Both Momento Cache and Momento Topics are serverless solutions that use AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, NoSQL, fully managed database with single-digit-millisecond performance at nearly any scale. “We’re inspired by serverless architecture because of the instant productivity boost that it offers customers,” says Khawaja Shams, cofounder and CEO of Momento. As an AWS Partner, Momento also benefited from the project with ZigZa because it gained direct feedback on its solutions and could implement the improvements for other customers.

“When we started working alongside AWS, it was the first time that I had worked with a service provider where I genuinely believe it is more concerned about our outcomes than about its bottom line,” says Delorenzi. “Momento has achieved the same feeling for us.”

ZigZa is working to release a new title in 2025, which will also use AWS Lambda and Momento. Now that ZigZa has a fully serverless architecture, it can focus on its games and player experience while continuing to reap the benefits of scalability and reliability.

“The true spirit of going serverless comes down to developers being able to iterate quickly while getting something out the door that can remain highly available and scale if the application becomes successful,” says Shams. “In the case of Tokyo Debunker, it was a wild success.”