GAM306: Building a Lake of Wisdom

Learn how Rovio replaced functionalities in their analytics platform provided by a 3rd party vendor in seven weeks with Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift. In the ever changing world of games, you must stay ahead of trends and understand your customer base's actions. We describe how we built a data lake using AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, and Amazon EMR. We give a general overview on our analytics stack, business problems unique to the gaming industry we're trying to solve, data philosophy (one truth, open data), and challenges we had at the beginning of this year. We also dive deep into areas most gaming companies struggle with, like how we manage the schemas, convert data to efficient columnar format, partition the data, ultimately use the data, and handle some of the challenges we faced using services like Athena. Learn about our quest to perfect games and customer gaming experience!