Everything I Learned About Scaling Online Games I Learned at Google and eBay: Scalability at KIXEYE

KIXEYE is a pre-IPO developer of online strategy and combat games based in San Francisco, and has grown 10x in the last 2 years. Funded by Trinity Ventures, we are profitable, and have over 500 employees across the US, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. KIXEYE's culture is defined by a passion for high quality, immersive real-time games and a desire to define the next generation of gaming online. We live by the credos Innovation Over Imitation, Quality Over Quantity, and Passion Over Profit.

While the worlds of ecommerce, search, and application platforms might seem as far from the gaming industry as one might imagine, lessons learned in those environments are surprisingly applicable to online games. Real-time games in particular face many of the same challenges faced -- and solved -- by companies like eBay and Google. They are extremely latency-sensitive, are subject to unpredictable growth and scalability curves, and exhibit extremely spiky load profiles. The real-time player experience is critical to the success of the company -- if a game is down or slow, players will leave and never come back. This session will discuss how experiences with large-scale websites like eBay and Google have informed our approach to building, testing, and operating real-time games at KIXEYE.

This session tells several war stories from eBay and Google about performance, consistency, iterative development, and autoscaling. It further puts it all together by connecting those experiences with what we are now doing in our next-generation gaming platform at KIXEYE.