Candy Crush creator King, the London-headquartered gaming colossus, is moving its core data infrastructure and AI/ML platform to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the company – which has 270 million monthly active users – announced this morning.
The mobile gaming company, which owns franchises Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Pet Rescue and Bubble Witch among 200+ other games, has one of Europe’s largest Hadoop clusters, with a double-digit number of petabytes online.
In a joint statement, CIO Jacques Erasmus and FVP Technology Åsa Bredin said: “In the last couple of years, we started to ask ourselves whether a monolithic on-premise Hadoop environment best set us up for the challenges of the future, particularly in a world where public cloud is becoming an ever-greater part of the IT landscape and – especially important for us – when much of the innovation in data science and data engineering is now taking place in public cloud.”
Move Will “Amplify Our Engineers’ Efforts”
Saying that a number of King’s teams had started to do more work with machine learning and AI, the two said they believe the move to GCP “will amplify our own talented engineers’ efforts… and areas of effort where King needs unique capabilities not provided by the market.”
Sunil Rayan, MD, Gaming, Google Cloud, said: “King has long been a leader in delivering delightful mobile gaming experiences to millions of players around the world. King will continue to innovate and demonstrate its leadership position as a global innovator by utilizing our big data, AI and machine learning capabilities to give its engineers the next generation of tools to build great experiences.”
He added: “We look forward to seeing King deliver even richer gaming experiences for players worldwide through our deep collaboration and the unique products and services Google Cloud offers game developers.”
King has game studios in Stockholm, Malmo, London, Barcelona, Berlin, San Francisco and Seattle, along with offices in Malta, Tokyo and Bucharest. It was acquired by Activision Blizzard for for $5.9 billion in February 2016 and operates as an independent unit of the company.
