Yile Technology relies on MongoDB Atlas to win global online gaming market share

INTRODUCTION

Taiwan’s gaming innovator goes global

Founded in 2018, Yile Technology Co. Ltd., is a Taiwanese mobile game developer dedicated to developing a variety of games with a sense of entertainment that bring the atmosphere of leisure and entertainment to players.

In just four years, Yile Technology scaled rapidly releasing its first three games and has emerged as one of Taiwan’s leaders in social casino gaming now employing 200 people. The company's Online808 and GBAO Online games are mainly designed for the Chinese market. By August 2021, Online808 had more than 1 million members.

Yile Technology is constantly optimizing the quality of its games and they have global aspirations for their newly launched Pocket Casino game as a starting point towards becoming the world's leading internationally renowned online game company.

Mezi Wu, Research and Development Manager at Yile Technology, said: “In the face of the fiercely competitive casino games market, we have to focus on product optimization and user experience improvement. MongoDB Atlas frees us from the burden of basic operational maintenance and maximizes the use of our most valuable resources: our people.”

THE CHALLENGE

Game’s slow response impacts user experience

From the very beginning, Yile Technology had identified the potential of mobile gaming with more and more people turning to their smartphones for fun and excitement.

The company evaluated the preferences and mobile phone usage habits of Taiwanese users and decided to target the rapidly growing online casino games market. In an effort to provide the best experience for gamers, Yile Technology decided to deploy their first game on Google Cloud, eliminating the need to purchase and maintain hardware equipment, thereby strengthening the stability of game services and reducing the response time of the application service.

Yile Technology produced its first prototype game Online808 within a few months underpinned by a relational database (RDBMS). However, during the internal stress test stage, the team encountered performance issues. Even when there were as few as 50 players connected to the game at the same time, the game response time could be as long as 3 seconds, far exceeding the 0.5 seconds minimum they had set themselves.

With only three months left until the launch date, the R&D team needed to solve the problem quickly. After a careful and in-depth investigation into the cause, they worked out that the root cause was the way player data was being stored in the relational database they were using.

Mezi Wu explained that the relational database worked relatively well for some aspects of the application which didn't require complex data or fast response times. However, when they needed to access player profiles in large numbers at the same time, their database couldn't cope.

“Our team sought alternatives to find a database with much stronger horizontal scalability. After assessing the pros and cons of a variety of solutions on the market, we decided to build with MongoDB's document database,” Mezi Wu said.

THE SOLUTION

MongoDB Atlas delivers scale, great user experience, and reduces maintenance cost

Although Yile Technology’s R&D team had not used MongoDB previously, they were impressed by the database's simple and easy-to-use features. Mezi Wu explained MongoDB’s extensive online resources and discussion forums also made it easier to become familiar with the technology and get started in a very short time. “Within a month, we had completely replaced the RDBMS and all customer profile data was stored on MongoDB, this included player status and previous behavior as well as some of the game’s operational data,” he said.

On the second round of the internal pressure test, the game’s responsive time improved significantly to well below the required 0.5 seconds, a more than 6x improvement. Powered by MongoDB, this responsiveness helped Online808 become the second best performing social casino game in Taiwan.

Their first game achieved a dazzling performance after launch and MongoDB enabled Yile Technology to scale well. However, the team was using the MongoDB community version and so they had to spend a lot of time manually working on system parameter adaptation, management, and performance alignment, which was creating a heavy burden for the R&D developers who wanted to focus on new features. They knew that as the company continued to grow, they needed more support.

Shortly after launching Online808, a Yile Technology team member was invited to MongoDB user group in Taiwan where they learnt about MongoDB Atlas. They realized the potential of moving to a fully managed cloud database service, which not only runs on major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, but also has functions such as horizontal scaling of databases and optimization of system performance. They ultimately wanted to reduce time spent on database maintenance and the associated costs, so six months after the first game was launched, Yile Technology decided to migrate to MongoDB Atlas.

“In fact, after launching the game, our focus naturally moved to management and maintenance. We needed to find tools that could help monitor the performance and operational status of the database, so that we can take corresponding strategies prior to performance bottlenecks appearing. That way we can ensure that we can give users the best gaming experience,” Mezi Wu explained.

“After all, the amount our R&D team can do is obviously limited. We need and expect them to focus on important jobs, such as developing new games and optimizing features. We would like to free them from database maintenance, with support from MongoDB experts,” he said.

With the MongoDB team’s consulting expertise and advice, Yile Technology successfully migrated all data including transaction data, and players’ historical data to MongoDB Atlas seamlessly. In addition, the MongoDB team also offered a lot of improvement suggestions based on the database usage, supporting Yile Technology to further improve the user experience and the overall stability of their games. Following this success, Yile Technology has now deployed MongoDB Atlas across all three games.

THE RESULTS

Yile Technology launches a new game, and lays a foundation for its future growth with MongoDB Atlas

Yi-Zheng Lin, Senior Database Administrator of Yile Technology, outlines the many benefits of deploying MongoDB Atlas. He said: "Firstly, with support from the MongoDB team, we have gained a better understanding of MongoDB features and advantages, and become more precise in our usage. Secondly, MongoDB Atlas provides an easy-to-use operation interface, which is faster and more convenient for database setup and can provide a high-availability architecture with zero downtime.

“And more importantly, in order to respond to changes in client read and write traffic, MongoDB Atlas can achieve vertical upgrade and horizontal expansion with zero downtime, greatly reducing maintenance operations. Similarly, there is no need to worry about the database version upgrade,” he said.

Yi-Zheng Lin explained when Yile Technology upgraded from MongoDB 3.6 to 4.4, it was achieved all completely online without affecting the operation of existing services. “It is also very convenient to raise a Support Ticket to request consulting services, and we can also enjoy technical support from the MongoDB team on a regular basis, which makes us feel safe and relaxed,” he said.

Following the success of their games and overall positive business performance, Yile Technology plans to expand their usage of MongoDB Atlas.

The R&D team will soon start testing the MongoDB transaction features with a view to using MongoDB Atlas for all its future cash flow data.

They also plan to start using the aggregation pipeline to better analyze user behaviors. And finally, as Yile Technology orients the business towards becoming a global operation without downtime, its new game Pocket Casino, will enable Global Clusters allowing users from different countries to enjoy a consistent user experience, with no added burden on the operations team.