SciPlay Games

A high-availability cloud model to keep a mobile game company playing

When SciPlay Games acquired Bingo Showdown, the company was already a longtime Deft customer for colocation.

But Bingo Showdown was built for the cloud.

The SciPlay team wanted a trusted advisor to put a second set of eyes on its cloud strategy. Not only did our practical recommendations reduce cloud costs by over 20%, Deft was able to help develop a high-availability cloud model that serves as the foundation for future games.

When high profits depend on high availability

There’s a reason Las Vegas is open at all hours. Seconds equal money — the more availability, the more people play, the more profit to be had. The same holds true for Bingo Showdown. Gaming apps need to be ready when the players are, making high availability an essential part of any business.

When every second of downtime costs dollars, it changes the math on infrastructure. Most of our clients are looking for “just enough” availability — the right balance of expense to risk of downtime. SciPlay is a little more conservative. The team there errs on the side of availability. If the resources aren’t there to handle traffic spikes, a sudden surge in popularity will turn into poor reviews instead of profits.

SciPlay Games had already perfected the approach to high availability for its games: work with Deft on colocation. With Bingo Showdown, however, it was acquiring a game built in and for the cloud. Moving it to a data center would have been inefficient.

The team had the internal expertise to support an application in the cloud, but they wanted to run their plan past someone they could trust to see if anything could be improved. With an app used as often as Bingo Showdown was, even small optimizations would add up to huge differences in the monthly infrastructure spend, app profitability, and player satisfaction.

Getting a second opinion, and saving 21%

The SciPlay team knows what they’re doing. By the time we came in, the right tooling was already in place. Our job wasn’t to figure out a direction. Our job was to fine-tune the work that had already been done.

By coming in with fresh eyes, we were able to see the infrastructure as a whole — how everything connected beyond the individual parts. That high-level perspective allowed us to see opportunities for small adjustments with outsized impacts. The efficiencies we found made the app work faster, made the infrastructure simpler to maintain, and made the entire network more secure.

We didn’t just give SciPlay a punch list. We worked with them to prioritize the work, determining what gets done and what goes on a wishlist. That included developing a roadmap for modernization. The team had plans to launch a new version of the game, pushing us to design an infrastructure for the app as it was today and as it would be tomorrow.

By helping the SciPlay team identify what was possible and what was practical, we were able to give them advice that immediately turned into action. It made for a satisfying relationship on all sides, and an immediately better infrastructure.

Establishing a model for high-availability cloud

The improvements weren’t just about increasing stability and saving on spend. A snappier, more responsive app creates a better user experience. This experience delivers more 4- and 5-star ratings in the app stores, which increases the opportunities for future profits.

SciPlay isn’t ready to move all its games to the cloud — a total migration just wouldn’t make sense for its business today. It is, however, in a much better position to assess the possibilities of cloud going forward as each game evolves. And if another opportunity to acquire a cloud-hosted game comes up, they already have a high-availability blueprint ready to go.