Amanotes Stays on Beat by Delivering ‘Simple Music Games’ to Millions Worldwide on AWS

In 2014, Nguyen Tuan Cuong and Vo Tuan Binh co-founded Amanotes to give users the ability to extend their interactions with music beyond listening. This meant using technology to create personalized experiences tailored to each users’ taste, consumption, and musical ability. 

Amanotes’ founders decided to focus on a niche the business describes as ‘Simple Music Games’; games that are intuitive and easy for users to interact with. In 2016, Amanotes developed Magic Tiles 3, a game requiring users to tap digital musical notes on their smartphone screens in sync with songs from selected genres.

Amanotes launched its business on the AWS Cloud for scalability, low latency, and stability. “We analyzed cloud providers and determined AWS had the extensive reach we required: 27 AWS Regions worldwide, each featuring multiple Availability Zones and hundreds of edge locations,” says Nguyen Nghi, Head of Technology at Amanotes.

Amanotes is running its application services, core database, and backend API services on the AWS Cloud. It uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver game content reliably and with low latency to its global user base. 

“With Amazon CloudFront, we’re delivering content that includes five leading music games to more than 120 million monthly active users who, collectively, make more than 90 million download requests per day,” says Nghi. “We can also secure the content from cyberattacks that could compromise our reputation and slow our expansion into new markets.”  

The business delivers its content files in 1.5 seconds or less, with smaller files delivered in just 0.1 seconds. Average request processing time for the Amanotes API is around 100 milliseconds. This low latency leads to repeat gamers and attracts advertisers. This in turn increases revenue generation from in-game and reward-based advertisements, pay-to-play, and subscriptions.  

To stay ahead of competitors, Amanotes needs to innovate continuously to deliver more immersive game experiences, while managing costs effectively. With Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate, the business easily deploys applications across a scalable, multi-region infrastructure and minimizes its technology team’s management and maintenance workload.

Amanotes is also leveraging Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run some of its services. “By leveraging managed services capabilities from Amazon EKS, our team can focus purely on application development without worrying about infrastructure,” says Nghi.

With AWS, Amanotes has built on the success of Magic Tiles 3 to develop another four major music games: Tiles Hop, Dancing Road, Beat Blader 3D, and Dancing Race, growing into a global app publisher. It’s now one of the leading mobile game publishers in Southeast Asia and one of the top music game publishers worldwide.  

The business is executing plans to complement its existing music ‘Play’ pillar with a ‘Learn’ pillar delivered through an educational music app, and a ‘Simulation’ pillar that gives users the ability to learn musical instruments through digital simulations. This strategy is designed to realize Amanotes’ vision of becoming the number one ecosystem for everyone to play, learn, create, and connect through music.

Amanotes plans to further leverage AWS Global Infrastructure and innovative solutions to grow its business in markets such as Japan and China. The business also believes new AWS edge locations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City present opportunities to acquire new customers in its domestic market. Nghi says, “We aim to grow our business as much as possible, and AWS provides the speed and scale we need to do this.”

Personalizing user experiences is key to Amanotes’ growth strategy. The business plans to use machine learning through Amazon Personalize to generate more relevant music recommendations to gamers, increasing engagement and growing revenue by attracting more customers.