Super Evil Megacorp: Pushing the boundaries of mobile games with Google Cloud
About Super Evil Megacorp
Super Evil Megacorp is an award-winning creator of multiplayer game experiences on a quest to break creative and technical boundaries in the industry with beautiful and responsive AAA experiences that perform on any device. Their previous title, Vainglory, is a cross-platform multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game that has been played by more than 45 million people.
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Contact usGoogle Cloud helps Super Evil Megacorp focus on making great games by making it easy to scale, serve, and understand a global audience.
Google Cloud results
- Automatically manages and scales infrastructure as needed, freeing up developers to focus on player experience and innovation
- Supports a robust analytics pipeline that connects player behavior with product and marketing investments
- Easily scales and expands servers in new regions to support a growing global community of gamers
Measures millions of player-generated events per day
If you enjoy playing games on mobile, there's a good chance you’ve heard of Vainglory, the cross-platform multiplayer online battle arena game played by more than 45 million people worldwide. Since its launch in 2014, its creator Super Evil Megacorp has attracted a community of gamers that enjoy developing complex skills and strategies while playing, and who expect games to keep up with their quick dexterity and creative thinking. To match these expectations, the company collaborated with Google Cloud for the development of its latest title, Catalyst Black.
"Global reach, reliability, low latency, and a robust analytics pipeline are some of our criteria to determine what technology is the right fit for Super Evil Megacorp, and Google Cloud ticks these boxes," shares Craig Wells, Senior Director of Operations at Super Evil Megacorp. "We had a number of learnings from the development of Vainglory that Google Cloud has solutions for."
Freeing up developers to focus on innovation with Google Kubernetes Engine
Wells explains that it was important for the team to roll their own deployment process and to automate certain aspects of their infrastructure management. Previously, the team had five engineers rotating on-call so that if a server went down or there was a sudden spike in traffic, an engineer had to manually adjust the game server fleet size. Now, Google Kubernetes Engine scales servers up and down automatically as needed.
"By leveraging an infrastructure that takes care of itself, we can focus instead on creating an engrossing game with exciting features," explains Wells. "This allows our team to push the boundaries of how multiplayer games on mobile can foster human connections, with new developments such as a drop-in/drop-out feature that allows players to join a friend’s match with minimal delay."
Meanwhile, the Super Evil Megacorp team leaned on Google Cloud for support when needed. "Google Cloud helped us learn and use new technologies such as Google Kubernetes Engine, making our transition a breeze. But beyond that, it also demonstrated true collaboration by helping us with non-technical processes, such as identifying partners who can help us run our live operations," shares Ian Fielding, General Manager at Super Evil Megacorp.
"Global reach, reliability, low latency, and a robust analytics pipeline are some of our criteria to determine what technology is the right fit for Super Evil Megacorp, and Google Cloud ticks these boxes. We had a number of learnings from the development of Vainglory that Google Cloud has solutions for."
—Craig Wells, Senior Director of Operations, Super Evil MegacorpTailoring game experiences to players with data analytics
Next, the team leveraged its Google Cloud infrastructure to establish a robust, real-time analytics pipeline that could help inform product decisions. "Data analytics enables us to recognize individual players and how they like to play so we can serve them a relevant experience," explains Volkan Ediz, Chief Revenue Officer at Super Evil Megacorp. "For example, based on their performance during the game tutorial and subsequent matches we can understand their skill level and pair them with similar players so they can have an enjoyable game that is neither too challenging nor too easy. The social aspect of our games is important to us; we’re here to enable connections between players and this includes making smart decisions about who they encounter during a game."
That’s why Super Evil Megacorp relies on Compute Engine, BigQuery, and Looker to scale its analytics frameworks and understand the players’ journey through live operations, statistical modeling, and A/B testing. The team also relies on this setup for observability, which includes looking at crash rates, application responsiveness rates, uptime of all services, and latency across all regions to ensure all of their players are getting the best possible game experience.
"Capturing large amounts of detailed data is critical in helping us understand how players behave and how the game itself is performing. Thanks to Google Cloud, we have gained the scalability, compute power, and support we need for raw event collection, data aggregation, and ETLing. As a result, we have cleaner structures of data which we can use for analysis," says Ediz.
To illustrate the scale of these operations, he adds: "With Catalyst Black in beta, with a small user base, we generated millions of events per day. That has gone up several orders of magnitude since we launched. That’s a big operation to handle but relying on Google Cloud means we had no concerns that the technical side of things would scale and keep up."
"We need outstanding analytics performance and speed, and Google Cloud enables this with solutions that integrate seamlessly on its platform. To top it off, we’re now spending only a fifth on a per daily active users basis compared to what we spent with our previous provider while working on Vainglory."
—Volkan Ediz, Chief Revenue Officer, Super Evil MegacorpAttracting and nurturing a free-to-play game community
As a developer of free-to-play games, Super Evil Megacorp also uses its robust analytics pipeline to support smart business decisions around marketing and products that help to sustain the business. To that end, it uses Google Analytics to maximize ROI on its paid media spend through traditional social media and advertising channels. The team also uses BigQuery ML models to estimate the lifetime of a user and predict ROS and ROI to optimize ad spend. Next, the team is looking at developing ML systems for programmatic media buying at scale.
"We believe that the player journey starts way before they’re actually playing the game," says Ediz. "Perhaps it’s when you come across an ad for the game on Google Search. Already at that stage we need data to determine what kinds of players we’re attracting, how our ads are performing, and whether we can better allocate our resources."
"We need outstanding analytics performance and speed, and Google Cloud enables this with solutions that integrate seamlessly on its platform," says Ediz. "To top it off, we’re now spending only a fifth on a per daily active users basis compared to what we spent with our previous provider while working on Vainglory."
"We can spin servers wherever we notice movement, and anticipate and build out our infrastructure as needed. Our games are live operations that organically change and grow, and with Google Cloud we can support players anywhere throughout that journey, so we’re excited to see where we’ll go from here."
—Craig Wells, Senior Director of Operations, Super Evil MegacorpDelivering great game experiences to anyone, anywhere
The launch of Catalyst Black in 2022 was an important occasion for Super Evil Megacorp, who prepared to accommodate a significant spike in the number of players as a result. "We went from a handful of regions in beta to global, and collaborating with Google Cloud means we were confident and prepared for that scalability," says Wells.
Meanwhile, with its in-house E.V.I.L. game engine, Super Evil Megacorp aims to not only reach players wherever they are in the world but also to make it possible for them to join in the fun regardless of what devices they own. The engine enables game performance with 30 frames per second on a range of devices; not just the latest, but devices dating as far back as 2016, making this game one of the most accessible in the industry.
Beyond the game launch, the company will observe where strong communities of players are rising so that it can continue to serve them. "We can spin servers wherever we notice movement, and anticipate and build out our infrastructure as needed," explains Wells. "Our games are live operations that organically change and grow, and with Google Cloud we can support players anywhere throughout that journey, so we’re excited to see where we’ll go from here."
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About Super Evil Megacorp
Super Evil Megacorp is an award-winning creator of multiplayer game experiences on a quest to break creative and technical boundaries in the industry with beautiful and responsive AAA experiences that perform on any device. Their previous title, Vainglory, is a cross-platform multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game that has been played by more than 45 million people.