Social gaming and online sports betting are competitive environments. Games must be able to handle large volumes of unpredictable traffic while simultaneously promising zero downtime. For these companies, user retention is no longer just desirable, it’s critical. Gamers expect to play whenever they want for as long as they want and have a low tolerance for delays or lag.
At the heart of any successful game is a database that maintains 100% uptime, scales in real time to handle millions of users, and provides users with a responsive and personalized experience across all of their devices. This is why gaming and betting companies choose Couchbase as they move away from monolithic solutions to microservice-based architectures, focusing on building engaging, responsive, and scalable applications.
Improving player experience through personalization and availability
Every game succeeds based on a positive player experience, and with rising expectations and the need for instant gratification, guaranteeing consistent, low-latency data access is critical. Gaming companies need a 360-degree view of their customers to provide them with real-time, personalized data for achievements, stats, and leaderboards. User profile data is stored to support multiple services and enable users to play games across different platforms and devices.
Player experience begins with availability. With users worldwide, a game not only has to be available 24×7, 365 days a year, but it also has to be available everywhere – with no single point of failure. Nexon, a global leader in virtual world games and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), uses Couchbase Capella™ Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) for greater developer agility. Capella’s high availability and distributed memory-first architecture deliver a consistent performance experience for players as game adoption grows.
“Harnessing the power of the cloud through Capella has allowed us to successfully run applications across multiple regions in parallel quickly and seamlessly. We are delighted to work closely with Couchbase,” said Jae Beom Cho, Director of Game Infrastructure at Nexon.
Scalability for any level of game popularity
Scalability is also a key consideration for gaming companies. In the present environment, social games have the potential to go viral at any time. Meeting this spike in demand can be overwhelming for relational databases. Couchbase supports these ever-increasing workloads and scales easily without disruption.
Jam City, a leader in mobile entertainment, provides unique and deeply engaging games that appeal to broad global audiences. Its wildly popular puzzle game Cookie Jam won Facebook’s Game of the Year after scaling to meet the demand of 35 million users globally in under eight months. Jam City and Couchbase teamed up in preparation for the massive spike in social and mobile hits once Cookie Jam had begun gaining traction. They successfully avoided downtime with Couchbase performance at scale and flexibility in rebalancing and failover through cross data center replication (XDCR).
Lower total cost of ownership and faster time to market
Couchbase drives flexibility and increased operational efficiency to keep up with the constantly updated and changing gaming data. Couchbase’s powerful query language allows developers to query JSON data using familiar, SQL-like expressions easily. Tightly integrated full-text search, real-time analytics, and powerful eventing services make it easy to add new features to applications on the fly without moving data into and managing dozens of database technologies.
Betfair, one of the world’s largest online sports betting providers, is experiencing improved performance, flexibility, and scalability of its NoSQL deployments with Couchbase. Betfair uses numerous applications to serve over 4 million funded accounts across 140 countries. To eliminate unnecessary complexity, the company moved many applications from Oracle to Couchbase. The platform provided easy integration and the continuous delivery needed to process over 30,000 bets per minute.
Integrated mobile capabilities support omnichannel experiences
Today’s gamers expect a seamless and consistent experience on their personal devices. Couchbase is the only NoSQL database with built-in mobile support. Couchbase Mobile extends Couchbase Server to the edge with an embedded NoSQL database (Couchbase Lite) and a web gateway (Sync Gateway). Apps continue to work offline regardless of network availability. This is esential for powering use cases at the edge, such as personalization, peer-to-peer messaging and sharing, and more.
Key use cases for mobile include messaging and IoT data management. Players message friends, invite them to join games, and receive notifications about changes to their player state. Gaming companies leverage connected devices to deliver content and personalized offers to users in real time to provide an even better experience.
To find out more about why customers in every industry choose Couchbase, check out our customer case study page. Want to learn more about how you can build your own modern applications on Couchbase? Try our 30 day free trial of Couchbase Capella.