Wooga needed a cloud solution specifically for social games, which have a variable and unpredictable number of players who require quick reaction speeds and high server reliability. These browser-based games can attract significant numbers of players in a short time. For example, Wooga’s Monster World has approximately two million players per day, corresponding to 15,000 requests per second at its peak, according to the company. Monster World runs entirely on the AWS Cloud. Another Wooga game, Magic Land, has 850,000 players per day, corresponding to 5,000 requests per second at its peak.

A game’s success or failure is determined largely by adoption rates—the number of users who decide to play. The number of players can be unpredictable; for some games, that number increases rapidly and then drops again. The challenge for Wooga is to continuously engage the players’ interest and provide for a high retention rate.

Monster World is a game with classic game architecture, using a stateless application server and central databases. Magic Land, by contrast, sits on non-standard architecture with stateful application servers, using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) instead of databases. See Figure 1 below for a screen capture of Monster World.