Gaming success

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 EXASolution.

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 player-centric business. Data helps us strike the right balance between challenge and fun in our games and see how, 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 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.”
An example is LEVEL 65 of Candy Crush Saga: 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 Hadoop-based 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.

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 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 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 fractions of the time it took previously.” states Andy Done.

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.”