Topebox: Bringing entertaining Vietnamese mobile games to the global stage
About Topebox
Founded in 2012, Topebox is a casual mobile gaming studio in Vietnam. Its games are among the most popular in Google Play and have also topped the gaming charts in the US, Japan, and China. Its ambition is to showcase the best of Vietnam’s technical capabilities on the world stage.
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About Cloud Kinetics
Cloud Kinetics is a leading cloud transformation solutions and managed services provider, offering many services across all major public cloud operators. It has helped hundreds of customers unlock newfound value by migrating and running business-critical systems to the cloud.
Google Cloud provided the right ecosystem for global gameplay by enabling Topebox to scale while ensuring high performance, security, and cost savings.
Google Cloud results
- Reduce service update duration from 60 minutes to 15 seconds
- Dashboard all service issues, alerts, and metrics for engineers to quickly react and resolve challenges
- No need to monitor server instances manually
- Reduce costs with spot VMs and pay-as-you-use resources
Reduces new service creation time from three hours to 30 minutes
Putting yourself on the map is never easy, particularly when you’re competing against some of the world’s finest in the industry. But this was the challenge that Vietnamese mobile game studio Topebox’s Chief Partner Officer, Vũ Duy Tiếp, wanted to step up to, as he believes in the unique potential of the games industry to showcase the best of Vietnam.
To him, talent is enough to create the next blockbuster game, without the need for expensive machinery, or complex production lines. This is where Topebox stands out, exemplifying the rare combination where passion and creativity can create the right atmosphere for this homegrown gaming studio to beat the best.
Its mobile game, Gun & Dungeons is one example of such a feat. It made the 2022 Google Play Users’ Choice Games top nine list, being the only Vietnamese mobile gaming application on the list. This game routinely tops the list of games in the United States, Japan, and China.
But for Topebox to continue producing winning games and ensure its millions of gamers enjoy an unmatched gaming experience, it needs a trove of powerful tools to help it succeed in the big leagues.
Discovering the right tools for global gameplay
While Topebox formerly relied on a hybrid cloud architecture with another cloud service to run its games, that was too limiting for its global ambitions. Only a full migration to Google Cloud in 2020, with the help of partner agency Cloud Kinetics (CK) could support what the studio wanted to accomplish.
"CK has been a very professional and enthusiastic partner who was always ready to support us whenever we needed help. They helped us set up servers, provided training, investigated integration problems and offered recommendations. With the efforts of the CK and Google Cloud Customer Success teams, we could handle any integration challenges and shave a significant amount of time off our workload," Tiếp says.
Before migrating to Google Cloud, Topebox had many problems with game releases. These included spending many hours deploying new servers, overcoming scaling difficulties, high management costs, and a high strain on human and physical resources.
"In our previous setup with a different cloud provider, our engineers routinely spent significant time managing our infrastructure’s scalability, performance, and security. The ability to autoscale services on Google Cloud without interrupting operations was a welcome change," says Nam Nguyen, the Chief Technology Officer of Topebox.
"In our previous setup with a different cloud provider, our engineers routinely spent significant time managing our infrastructure’s scalability, performance, and security. The ability to autoscale services on Google Cloud without interrupting operations was a welcome change."
—Nam Nguyen, Chief Technical Officer, TopeboxA scalable platform for global mobile gaming
Today, fully managed, autoscaled virtual machines on Compute Engine and microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine deliver sufficient power for global gameplay. These two key solutions have helped Topebox developers to accelerate workflows when deploying new services.
"Google Cloud products like spot virtual machines and other pay-as-you-use resources have significantly impacted our company’s bottom line. We’ve also seen a big change in our backend operations since implementing Google Cloud when it comes to speed," Nam adds.
"Google Cloud products like spot virtual machines and other pay-as-you-use resources have significantly impacted our company’s bottom line. We’ve also seen a big change in our backend operations since implementing Google Cloud when it comes to speed."
—Nam Nguyen, Chief Technical Officer, TopeboxPreviously, Topebox’s architecture was fragmented, being both on-prem and on a different cloud provider. It took up to three hours to create a new service and up to an hour to update it. With all of its services now consolidated on Google Cloud, Topebox developers only need to spend a maximum of 30 minutes to create a new service and 15 seconds to update it, streamlining the process and shortening time to market.
They can also use comprehensive dashboards with Cloud Monitoring to oversee their deployed services’ performance, availability, and health. With this solution, they can easily detect and remedy accidents, critical issues, and alerts from workload logs within minutes. In contrast, Topebox’s formerly needed a dedicated systems and operation administrator to manually monitor all server instances, which took up to a day to complete.
Security has also increased with Google identity and Access Management, which helps simplify control over Google Cloud services and manage control access to resources with custom policies.
A single ecosystem to create new award-winning mobile games
Among the many factors that Topebox prioritizes in its games, the user experience (UX) and game performance are its highest. Since migrating to Google Cloud, Topebox reports better UX, increased game loading speeds, and smoother in-game user interactions. They also experience virtually no downtime since the migration.
"We have implemented almost all of our infrastructure on Google Cloud to unite event-driven designs and real-time microservices delivery with gRPC and Rest API, CI/CD integration with Jenkins, and Infrastructure as Code with Helm charts, Terraform, and Google Cloud SDK," adds Nam.
As a result, It now just takes seconds to ensure that all its game services have high availability, with resources and services easily managed from the command line. Cloud SDK also contains service and data emulators to speed up local development.
"For the past 12 years, we have achieved considerable success with our hit games. This has only increased our commitment to delivering games without bugs or performance issues. With Google Cloud's assistance, we increased business productivity and solved our game development challenges," says Tiếp.
"For the past 12 years, we have achieved considerable success with our hit games. This has only increased our commitment to delivering games without bugs or performance issues. With Google Cloud's assistance, we increased business productivity and solved our game development challenges."
—Vũ Duy Tiếp, Chief Partner Officer, TopeboxAugmenting a successful team with new collaboration solutions
While powerful Google Cloud solutions have helped to transform Topebox’s gaming experience, its team members needed a comprehensive solution to improve and increase collaboration in a time of growth.
"Before discovering Google Workspace, we used many disparate tools for work and communication. We found Google Workspace to be like a shopping mall where we could pick and choose what we wanted to facilitate collaboration," Tiếp says.
These productivity tools have revamped Topebox’s internal communications. Gmail, for example, has become the company’s default emailing app. Meet played a big role in ensuring teams could sync up regularly, while Docs has become an irreplaceable solution to sharing and co-working.
"Our teams are very satisfied that all the products on Google Workspace work together and integrate smoothly. We can communicate efficiently and accept information and data from anywhere," adds Tiếp.
As Topebox looks forward to launching several new products in the near future, they are aware of the significant investments in talent and industry partnerships to support these ambitions. To that end, they have identified several Google Cloud solutions that can help accelerate the realization of these products, including using AI and Machine Learning solutions to develop smart in-game bots that better understand players and ingest even more data points from gameplay.
"We are confident that Google Cloud will continue to be the right partner for our global ambitions to become a reality," Tiếp concludes.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Topebox
Founded in 2012, Topebox is a casual mobile gaming studio in Vietnam. Its games are among the most popular in Google Play and have also topped the gaming charts in the US, Japan, and China. Its ambition is to showcase the best of Vietnam’s technical capabilities on the world stage.
About Cloud Kinetics
Cloud Kinetics is a leading cloud transformation solutions and managed services provider, offering many services across all major public cloud operators. It has helped hundreds of customers unlock newfound value by migrating and running business-critical systems to the cloud.