Success Story | King
1 petabyte of data
149 million daily
active users
1.5 billion game
plays per day
Player
retention
Gaming
experience
Player
satisfaction
Player
acquisition
Games run
better
Using analytics to deliver the best
gaming experience at King
Perhaps best known for developing Candy Crush Saga, King Digital Entertainment currently generates
over one petabyte of data a year. Analysing the data and acting on evidence generated by 1.5 billion
game plays per day, rather than guesswork, gives King the edge over its competitors. It allows King
to deliver a superior gaming experience, keeping its 149 million daily active users coming back for
more. To do this, King uses a combination of open source Hadoop and the fastest in-memory analytic
database in the world, EXASOL’s scalable, self-tuning solution.
King has more than 195 games in over 200 countries
and currently generates over one petabyte of data a
year. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data; the
equivalent of over 200,000 DVDs. Analysing the data
and acting on evidence generated by 1.5 billion game
plays per day, rather than guesswork, gives King the
edge over its competitors. It allows King to deliver a
superior gaming experience, keeping its 149 million
daily active users coming back for more. To do this,
King uses a combination of open source Hadoop and
the fastest in-memory analytic database in the world,
EXASOL’s scalable, self-tuning solution.
Andy Done says: “King uses its data to enhance our
players’ experience, to constantly improve our games,
and to drive innovation. Our ability to gain valuable
insights from our data is at the heart of being a playercentric business. Data helps us strike the right balance
between challenge and fun in our games and see how,
EXASOL AG | Phone: +49 911.23 99 10 | [email protected] | www.exasol.com
EXASOL is a registered trademark. All mentioned trademarks are protected and are the property of their respective owners.
© 2015, EXASOL AG | All rights reserved.
Success Story | King
when and why people spend money in our games.
We use this information to make small, but vitally
important improvements, making them more playable,
whilst helping us to retain our loyal players and attract
new players.”
“All our games are entirely free to play. Players come
to us because they love our games. Our revenue
comes from virtual items our players can purchase if
they choose to. In a competitive market when another
game is just a few clicks away, we want to earn the
loyalty of our players every time they play and provide
a high quality experience. So we need to make sure
we‘re making the most of our data to help create a
perfect, well-rounded and balanced game.”
Two petabytes of data requires a
superior analytics database
Since King’s inception, the amount of data has
increased exponentially, which has created a large
challenge for data analytics. King started as a gaming
website, moving onto social media and then mobile by
November 2012. By the end of 2013, it had attracted
408 million active users, and in March 2014, it
underwent an IPO in the United States.
Andy Done, Data Platform Lead, says: “Data is very
important to King’s game development process and
EXASOL gives us a powerful tool to deliver the best
possible experience for our players. The ability to
analyse this data effectively, and get the answers we
need, when we need them, is critical to our business.”
By careful analysis of their data, King noticed that a lot
of players were getting stuck on level 65 and possibly
getting frustrated and leaving. This told King that
change was required. People enjoy games because
they are the perfect balance between challenging and
fun. Level 65 was very hard to pass. By making a small
change to the level design the problem was solved.
Hadoop needs real-time analytics
King didn’t always have EXASOL in place. It started life
as a pure Hadoop player, but the unprecedented levels
of data it was receiving placed exceptional demands
on its infrastructure and it needed to scale to meet the
challenge, and fast. Andy says: “The infrastructure we
had in place prior to going mobile was all Hadoopbased and while we could have scaled Hadoop to get
the speeds that we needed for our analysis, it would
have required us to throw hundreds of servers and
many more engineers at the problem, which was a
costly prospect.”
It was at this point that King realised that Hadoop alone
was not the solution. “Hadoop was working for us to
an extent, but it became clear very quickly that it was
not the whole answer. Hadoop is very good at some
things like cost-effective storage of vast quantities of
data, but not so good at rapid analysis. So we went
looking for something that could complement Hadoop
and address its weaknesses,” Andy continues.
Andy Done also points out that the status quo of lengthy
waits for answers to queries and questions on the data
was fast becoming a pea in the mattress. The business
needed answers quicker to be able to react and stay
ahead of its customers’ needs. It was important that
whatever technology was implemented next could
meet this criteria.
Future-proofing for all scaling
challenges
As an innovative, agile and creative technology
company, King is happy to experiment with its
technology for long-term gain. It was decided there
must be a way to move forwards with its analytics
platform so it threw down the gauntlet to the best
database technologies it could find and set a list of
demanding criteria that the ideal solution would need
to fulfil.
Any new technology needed to coexist with Hadoop
and be able to ingest data from the Hadoop File
System. It also had to be easy to evaluate as King did
not want to waste time or money setting up expensive
test infrastructure. Ideally the data had to remain on
site and once the database was in operation, King
did not want to have to hire database administrators
simply to run the database; it needed to run itself. The
new technology also had to be fast.
“If the business had not continued to grow at such a
fast pace, the first analytics database we implemented
would have continued to work well for us. It proved to
us that we were on the right track and that a hybrid
approach – pairing Hadoop with an analytics database
– could offer us the best of both worlds. But the
demands of scale were taking their toll and we needed
a better solution. So we set about testing a variety of
other providers,” says Andy.
EXASOL AG | Phone: +49 911.23 99 10 | [email protected] | www.exasol.com
EXASOL is a registered trademark. All mentioned trademarks are protected and are the property of their respective owners.
© 2015, EXASOL AG | All rights reserved.
Success Story | King
Instant testing on a portable
trolley
Testing new analytics databases can be a headache.
Some databases have specific hardware requirements
which must be purchased or hired in advance. Off-site
or cloud-based testing can also present data security,
confidentiality or regulatory concerns. And in the
case of King the data volume itself posed practical
challenges.
EXASOL, however, does things differently. If internal
server resources are not available, they bring a
small, portable server trolley that can be wheeled
in anywhere, plugged in instantly and is ready for
testing from the off. The data never leaves the building
and there is total transparency. This proved hugely
attractive to King, as were the results.
A self-optimising database was
critical to success
“The other databases tested were, at best, half as
fast as EXASOL on equivalent hardware, and while
extensive tuning and optimisation may have closed
the gap, this was not the path we wanted to take. King
is a fast-moving business and the queries required
to uncover vital information are difficult to predict in
advance, making a self-optimising database a very
attractive proposition.
“While many MPP database providers claim they are
self-tuning, EXASOL’s technology is the only one I’ve
come across that truly lives up to the promise. By
optimising itself, with no need for manual intervention,
we get the answers we need, quickly and without
having to hire expensive DBAs or for my team to
have to spend time on it. This means we can focus on
helping the business grow, rather than turning knobs’,
states Andy.
Queries that took hours can now
be done in seconds
EXASOL has exceeded King’s expectations. Andy
comments: “Since we put EXASOL in place, the amount
of data being generated has more than doubled and
EXASOL has easily scaled to meet the challenge. And
with Version 5, the performance is only improving.
We‘re confident that EXASOL will continue to grow
and evolve with us to meet the changing demands of
our business.”
The other benefit King has realised since using EXASOL
is that queries that used to take hours can now be done
in just seconds and complex data processing tasks,
previously thought daunting, completed with ease.
Andy explains: “Having the right data available at the
right time is vital for our users. Jobs that previously
EXASOL AG | Phone: +49 911.23 99 10 | [email protected] | www.exasol.com
EXASOL is a registered trademark. All mentioned trademarks are protected and are the property of their respective owners.
© 2015, EXASOL AG | All rights reserved.
Success Story | King
ran late into the afternoon are now finished and ready
before anyone is even in the office. That‘s made a
huge difference for our users and freed my team up to
tackle even harder problems, handle more requests,
and to be more responsive to the business.”
EXASOL has brought data even
further into the heart of King
EXASOL has allowed King to make data available to a
wider audience within the business, and to departments
that previously weren’t a focus. The business is using
data in many more ways than it had been, for example,
the customer care team is now using data analytics
to give loyal players an even better customer support
experience. Before EXASOL, it was hard to see how
this would have happened and King is now exploring
the possibility of other systems and department teams
making use of the company’s data to positively impact
the business in different ways.
Candy Crush
Andy concludes: “EXASOL allows my team to serve
the business better, providing them with the data they
need, in turn giving our players an incredible gaming
experience. By using EXASOL to analyse our data,
we continue to place the customer at the very heart
of everything we do –not just a philosophy, but as a
working practice. We’re enjoying our partnership with
EXASOL and look forward to seeing what else it can
deliver in the future.”
Aaron Auld, CEO, EXASOL comments: “Companies
across all industry areas are increasingly
acknowledging the benefits that fast analytics can
bring to effectively harness rapidly growing mountains
of data to make smarter business decisions, enhance
customer loyalty and drive new revenue streams.
King is an excellent example of how simple, smart and
super-fast in-memory, analytics databases make good
business sense and we look forward to working with
King in a long-term partnership to ensure it remains at
the very forefront of the global, mobile gaming world.”
“EXASOL has solved problems
for us that were previously
deemed intractable.
The investment has rapidly
paid off and delivered value
to our business. Our users
get answers to their business
queries in a fraction of the time
it took previously.“
Andy Done, Data Platform Lead at King
About King Digital
King Digital Entertainment plc (NYSE: KING) is a leading
interactive entertainment company for the mobile
world. It has a network of 356 million monthly unique
users as of fourth quarter 2014, and offers more than
195 exclusive games in over 200 countries and regions
through its king.com and royalgames.com websites,
Facebook, and mobile distribution platforms such as
the Apple App Store, Google Play Store and Amazon
Appstore. King has game studios in Stockholm,
Bucharest, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin and
Singapore along with offices in San Francisco, Malta,
Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai.
EXASOL AG | Phone: +49 911.23 99 10 | [email protected] | www.exasol.com
EXASOL is a registered trademark. All mentioned trademarks are protected and are the property of their respective owners.
© 2015, EXASOL AG | All rights reserved.