In an ideal world, databases can scale in and out without downtime while offering the advantages of a relational database. But what if the game is a runaway hit and exceeds the anticipated demand? And what about the long tail representing a gradual decrease in active players? What if it’s an out-and-out flop? MySQL sharding is not dynamically scalable, and adjusting its size requires maintenance as well as risk. If the game is as popular as expected, everything is fine. That causes gaming companies to overprovision the database to eventually handle more players than they expect. Most gaming developers calculate the number of shards they’ll need for the database before the game launches, since resharding is labor-intensive and error-prone.

Sharding has a number of drawbacks, however. And when a single instance of MySQL can’t handle the load anymore, you can divide the load by sharding-splitting users into groups and assigning them to multiple independent instances of MySQL.

Indeed, as a scale-up database if you want to increase MySQL performance, you need to add more CPU, RAM or disk. While MySQL offers many advantages, it has one big limitation: scalability. Even outside gaming, MySQL is a widely used and most backend engineers have a lot of experience using it.

This simplifies a lot on the application side-no need to handle database limitations like eventual consistency or schema enforcement. MySQL is used extensively by gaming companies in Japan. Engineers there are used to working with relational databases with schema, SQL queries and strong consistency. Let’s take a look at how BNE worked with Google Cloud to build the infrastructure for Dragon Ball Legends. And because Google Cloud Platform (GCP) runs on the same infrastructure as these Google services, GCP customers can take advantage of the same enabling technologies. Google has multiple global services with more than a billion users, and we use the data those services generate to improve them over time. Then the operation team can measure and evaluate how people are playing the game and adjust it on-the-fly.Īll three of these are areas where we have a lot of experience. The game is designed to evolve with players in real-time, so it was critical to have a data analytics pipeline to stream data to a data warehouse. Because the game allows real-time player-versus-player battles, it needed a reliable and low-latency network across regions. The game would be launched globally, so it needed a backend that could scale with millions of players and still perform well. Based on their anticipated demand, BNE had three ambitious requirements for their game:

Dragon ball legends mobile game