Games giant King partners with Google Cloud to harness power of data

22 Aug 2018

Candy Crush Saga on a mobile device. Image: dennizn/Shutterstock

London-headquartered gaming firm King is making a major change to how it manages its data.

King is one of the world’s largest mobile gaming developers, with more than 270m people around the globe playing one of its titles every month. Games under the King umbrella include Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch, among others.

Data analytics is crucial for King

King also takes a special interest in data analytics, which it uses every day across the business to understand how its players interact with its many titles.

King has one of Europe’s largest Hadoop clusters. Hadoop is an Apache open source framework based on published work from Google. It consists of a double-digit number of petabytes online for its data science and engineering teams to query.

New partnership with Google Cloud

As cloud computing continued to evolve over the last number of years, King has been re-examining its infrastructure. The company has today (22 August) announced that it will be moving its core data infrastructure and AI/machine learning platform to Google Cloud.

The gaming company explained that the increasing presence of public cloud in the IT landscape and the innovation potential there in data science and engineering were the main drivers for migrating the system.

King’s Åsa Bredin, first vice-president of technology, and Jacques Erasmus, CIO, said: “We believe that our move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – a transformational change for King that is already underway – will amplify our own talented engineers’ efforts, allow us to focus more on differentiation [and] areas of effort where King needs unique capabilities not provided by the market.”

Sunil Rayan, managing director for gaming at Google Cloud, said that King would use Google Cloud’s big data, AI and machine-learning capabilities to give its engineers new tools.

Rayan added: “We look forward to seeing King deliver even richer gaming experiences for players worldwide through our deep collaboration and the unique products and services Google Cloud offers game developers.”

Candy Crush Saga on a mobile device. Image: dennizn/Shutterstock

Ellen Tannam was a journalist with Silicon Republic, covering all manner of business and tech subjects

editorial@siliconrepublic.com