PeopleFun: Delivering exciting gaming experiences to the players of the #1 Word Game with the help of Google Cloud
About PeopleFun
PeopleFun is an award-winning creator of mobile games for players across the globe with a mission of bringing People together through Fun. With an international team headquartered in Dallas, Texas, we believe in coming together as strong teams to create the most socially engaging experiences to bring our players together. Our #1 word game, Wordscapes, transformed the word game category into one of the top genres on mobile.
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About Persistent
Persistent is a Google Partner that delivers innovative services, including advance analytics and AI use-cases across Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and location-based intelligence for complex business challenges.
PeopleFun delivers personalized gaming experiences that boost engagement and revenues with Google Cloud and Managed Services Provider Persistent.
Google Cloud results
- Accelerates deploying new games and in-game promotions
- Increases quality and trustworthiness of platform data
- Uses AI and machine learning to increase competitiveness in the gaming sector
Uses AI to deliver meaningful personalized in-game experiences and promotions
PeopleFun, an AppLovin studio, is an award-winning creator of mobile games enjoyed by millions of people all over the world. Through its headquarters in Texas and an international team, the company creates groundbreaking games, notably Wordscapes, a top mobile game which challenges players to find hidden words and has more than 50 million downloads. Other leading games include Wordscapes Search, Brinks N Balls, and Blockscapes.
Bourke Floyd, VP Engineering, Platform at PeopleFun, says, "Our mission is simple: To bring people together through fun. For our players, their communities, and ourselves as we create games."
PeopleFun uses secure, low-latency Google Cloud, including Google App Engine, Datastore, and BigQuery to run its applications, manage data, and rapidly scale its game infrastructure. They are also ramping up use of Google Cloud Run with docker and GitHub Action workflows. The company also partners with Managed Services Provider Persistent for marketing analytics and in-game personalization based on Google Cloud AI and machine learning tools like Vertex AI.
Helping small teams serve millions of players with Google Cloud
Bourke and his team are responsible for the performance of PeopleFun's game platform that supports enjoyable player experiences. "With Google Cloud, we ensure the low latency and high availability of our backend systems and enable services that contribute to a smooth, engaging player experience. This also ensures that we are supporting critical business KPIs including player engagement, retention, and lifetime value," he says.
"With Google Cloud we ensure the low latency and high availability of our backend systems and enable services that contribute to smooth, engaging player experiences."
—Bourke Floyd, VP Engineering, Platform, PeopleFunThese features have been vital for PeopleFun's growth. "Google App Engine is ahead of its time and proven when it comes to auto scaling and providing a serverless workflow for developers. BigQuery and Datastore are also ideal for the huge volumes of data that we manage daily. Google Cloud Run provides Kubernetes based microservices approach for newer backend services with docker."
Most of all, Google Cloud enables PeopleFun to focus on supporting game developers rather than usage based scaling infrastructure and management. "We are a lean team of about 10 people. Google Cloud enables us to concentrate on adding value to the business rather than requiring us to build our own custom infrastructure to manage and operate."
Using AI to personalize player experiences
This lean, agile approach led PeopleFun to partner with Google Managed Services Provider Persistent. "Where we don't have the expertise in house, we leverage the experience of an expert third party. Persistent's core skills include machine learning and AI, which are ideal for gaming experiences built around players."
Arpit Agrawal, Engineering Partner - AI Services, Persistent Systems, says, "PeopleFun already had a heuristic, rules-based recommendation engine which activates in-game promotions, but it couldn't target individuals with tailored offers. Thanks to the cutting-edge AI tools in Google Cloud, we were able to deliver a more personalized experience, including in-game promotions."
The entire personalization stack was built on top of Google Cloud's data platform, including Vertex AI for machine learning, and BigQuery, Dataflow, and Datastore for data. "We then built APIs that enable the PeopleFun team to integrate advanced features into their games," says Agrawal.
PeopleFun achieved meaningful improvements in KPIs when tested with these personalized promotions and experiences.
"With the cutting-edge AI tools in Google Cloud, we were able to deliver a more personalized experience, including in-game promotions, to each player."
—Arpit Agrawal, Engineering Partner - AI Services, Persistent SystemsCreating a more agile business
Persistent continues to support PeopleFun's Google Cloud roadmap. Bourke says, "On the data engineering side, we're responsible for ingesting large volumes of data from our video game software framework. PeopleFun is advising us on how we can streamline our data workflow and better validate the data using Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and BigQuery alongside our other data engineering pipelines."
As well as Google Cloud expertise, Persistent stands out for its ability to collaborate and communicate with the PeopleFun team. "Persistent has helped us become more agile so we can support the business when it requests changes to the recommendation engine," says Bourke.
"Google Cloud technologies and Persistent's expertise helps us launch new games, add new features, and deliver highly personalized gaming experiences."
—Bourke Floyd, VP Engineering, Platform, PeopleFunKnowledge transfer is also important. "We get a lot of input from Persistent that enables us to pick up some of the responsibilities in our Google Cloud environment," says Bourke. "Above all, we can leverage Persistent expertise and continue to innovate both our core platform and games themselves."
Looking to the future, PeopleFun is migrating its apps and other game backend activities to a containerized, microservices environment based on Cloud Run. "Using containers for our development workflows means that we can deploy new games and features fast while mitigating the impact on other services and the gaming experiences of our user base," says Bourke.
PeopleFun is building additional experimentation, liveops, and other game services for modern mobile game development and operations while leveraging Google Cloud. "We have to innovate to stay ahead in a super-competitive marketplace," says Bourke. "Google Cloud technologies and Persistent's expertise helps us launch new games, add new features, and deliver highly personalized gaming experiences."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About PeopleFun
PeopleFun is an award-winning creator of mobile games for players across the globe with a mission of bringing People together through Fun. With an international team headquartered in Dallas, Texas, we believe in coming together as strong teams to create the most socially engaging experiences to bring our players together. Our #1 word game, Wordscapes, transformed the word game category into one of the top genres on mobile.
About Persistent
Persistent is a Google Partner that delivers innovative services, including advance analytics and AI use-cases across Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and location-based intelligence for complex business challenges.