CUSTOMER SNAPSHOT
Efficiently delivering high-quality gaming content to millions of players worldwide
Founded in 2009, Plarium Global Ltd. is dedicated to creating the best mobile and social experience for hardcore gamers worldwide. With over 90 million registered users, Plarium is consistently ranked among Facebook’s top hardcore game developers.
Plarium is headquartered in Israel with three offices and development studios across Europe. The company’s most popular titles include Total Domination®, Pirates: Tides of Fortune™, Stormfall: Age of War®, Soldiers Inc.™, Sparta: War of Empires™ and Total Domination: Reborn™ for iOS. With each title’s success, Plarium remains one of the world’s fastest growing game developers.
Its hardcore social games are available on all major social networks, including Facebook, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and Mail.ru, as well as web browsers and iOS. Plarium’s hardcore gamers constantly challenge the company to make its games better in ways that it never envisioned. They’ve built global communities, forged new friendships, and done more than just “play” its games – they’ve brought them to life.
Plarium’s growth is centered on expanding its gamer population globally. In addition, while most of its current players are hardcore gamers on social platforms, a key dimension to its strategy is to offer its games on any platform its gamers want to play, whether it is the web, social or mobile.
Hardcore gamers demand the highest performance and reliability regardless of platform. As a result, Edgio Delivery is critical to this global, multi-platform expansion strategy.
Plarium’s Story
Yair Pines is Plarium’s Head of IT and is responsible for “everything with blinking lights and cables” at the company. He describes himself as a curious guy. “If I can learn more about anything, I do it myself.” As a result, the company originally deployed homegrown load-balancing technology but reached a point where it became almost impossible to grow its delivery and performance infrastructure while maintaining sufficient caching.
“As we expand globally, and maintain and grow a loyal user base, we need to have a long-term technology strategy. It’s not acceptable to our gamers for content to go offline, so we needed to be assured that not only is the solution reliable, but that we get immediate help if something goes wrong and we can restore service as fast as possible.”
Yair Pines, Head of IT – Plarium
Plarium’s Challenge
Expand globally across platforms while maintaining the high performance expected by hardcore gamers.
The challenge of handling 90 million players globally and 3 million players per day is daunting. Knowing that you are responsible for the experience of millions of hardcore gamers that love our titles is challenging.
Plarium was expanding its reach globally, and the challenge was finding a solution with low latency with very fast deployment. They wanted to address the issue of having their content in the right location for global access. They didn’t want to worry about uploading content and manually ensuring it was in the right location. The criteria for choosing the right solution focused on finding the fastest and most reliable technology from a vendor with the best technical service. In addition, planning for expansion for support of multiple platforms was in their long-term plans.
“Edgio makes my world much easier,” said Yair. “That’s been true from the very beginning, as migrating to Edgio was a nobrainer. We fed our URL’s and files into the platform, performed some testing and we were done.
Overall, I don’t want to worry about uploading content and making sure it gets delivered to all regions of the world. I just upload our content into one place in the cloud and that’s it.It’s there and our gamers get it with the performance that they expect.”
Plarium’s Solution
Yair Pines and Plarium chose Edgio, teamed with a local partner, Ray Networks because they needed the peace of mind of a very fast content delivery solution with the required reliability. Edgio’s Delivery and Storage services decreased loading time for Plarium’s gamers by over 200 percent.
In searching for a solution, Yair had clear goals – a reliable, fast, global CDN. More specifically, he wanted:
Performance
How could Plarium ensure its users got the content as soon as possible? Performance expectations from their gaming customers are very high.
Reliability
How could Yair ensure that the content was always available?
Global Reach
Plarium had expanded to other parts of the world, so their reach was now global. Any solution must be global while still providing high performance and reliability.
Plarium’s process for selecting its content delivery and performance solution was to conduct anonymous RUM testing in multiple regions worldwide over a month. Edgio easily outperformed all competitors in certain regions of the world.
Edgio also has proved its value as the best platform with the best technical service. Yair recalled when he was at a customer event with his Edgio counterpart, and a content delivery issue arose.
“Our Edgio rep pulled out his mobile phone and they solved the problem in minutes. It turned out that content was not loading in one of our sub-domains, which ultimately was related to clients in some parts of the world, but Edgio still determined the source of the problem, and were able to bypass the problem.”
“Knowing that there’s always someone that I can talk to at Edgio that can solve any problem is very reassuring,” Yair continued. “Edgio gives us peace of mind. It has a very fast deployment, but technology is only half the picture. The customer service I get from Edgio is second to none.”