USE CASES

Astra DB for Gaming

Gaming encompasses a variety of player choices. Players can choose to play games on consoles or participate in online games, either through mobile, social, or cloud gaming platforms. Games can be  single-player or multiplayer games with players joining from different regions and geographies. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) gaming platforms are also on the rise.

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Why Astra DB for Gaming?

See Astra DB in action

Massive Scale and High Availability

Astra DB can easily grow to accommodate millions of players. Players do not tolerate lag or stuttering during active play, and they expect their games to be always online, without any downtime. Astra DB’s low read/write latencies at a massive scale, combined with its high-availability, ensures a real-time interactive gaming experience for players when and where they want it.

Multi-model Flexibility and Security for Data

Gaming requires a variety of data that must be managed securely within the gaming platform, such as players’ profiles, their leaderboards, and their in-game currency and purchases. Astra DB supports Document (JSON), REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs and has the multimodel flexibility to manage the wide variety of data in gaming platforms. Player account and session data is secured end-to-end with industry standard TLS connections, data-at-rest encryption bring-your-own-key (BYOK) management.

Data Pipelines for Real-time Gaming

Change Data Capture (CDC) for Astra DB is powered by Astra Streaming and allows the creation of real-time data pipelines for analytics. With CDC, changes to Astra DB data can be immediately sent to machine learning (ML) models and data warehouses (DWH) for analytics to drive recommendations and actions. These integrations enable real-time updates to a game experience such as inventory of in-game virtual products and goods, player metrics and achievements, leaderboards, etc.

Choose Any Cloud

Astra DB is multimodal and globally distributed. Astra DB spans multiple data centers and cloud regions and can be deployed in AWS, GCP and Azure. Astra DB maintains compatibility with open-source Cassandra anywhere and at any scale, allowing players to participate in massive, multiplayer online games all over the world. Additionally, Astra DB also eliminates the overhead of installation and maintenance to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for any gaming platform.

Architecture for Gaming Applications

Astra DB can manage all kinds of data for gaming platforms. CDC and Astra Streaming can be combined to easily create real-time data pipelines between Astra DB and ML models and data warehouses. These integrations enable real-time analytics and updates.

Architecture for E-Commerce Applications

Industry & Customer Success

ESL Gaming relies on DataStax for critical real-time global gaming service delivery. ESL Gaming is the world's largest eSports network, supporting today’s most popular video games with high-profile, branded international leagues and tournaments. The ESL Play service has more than 11 million members and has given out more than €7million in prizes.

Ben Burns, Vice President Technology at ESL Gaming, said, "In the gaming sector, you have to be available 24/7, and you have to be fast. While we have a large deployment in terms of size, what really matters to us is the stability, integrity and availability of that data, as we have to support millions of users around the clock and around the world." He said, "Our operations -- and our business -- rely on Cassandra and DataStax.”

Read how ESL Gaming uses DataStax for gaming

MegaZebra is one of Europe's first - and most successful - social and mobile gaming companies. MegaZebra has served more than 100 million players across its platforms since originally launching its first game in 2010.

Henning Kosmack, CEO at MegaZebra says “While we have seen some cost improvements, it was not the main factor in our decision - with Astra DB, we now have better performance, more reliability, and faster time to delivery, which are essential in our industry. It means we can concentrate on new and interesting features for players.”

Read how MegaZebra uses Astra DB for gaming

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