Building a gaming experience that’s fun and secure
Of data from 40+ services managed successfully
Of streaming data processed each day
Employees enabled with a single solution
KRAFTON has long captivated gamers with leading titles like TERA, boasting over 20 million global accounts, and Battlegrounds, breaking records in over 240 countries. To fulfill their customer-first mission, KRAFTON partners with game studios to publish titles that deliver unique and engaging experiences. However, fragmented data management across their game development teams contributed to operational inefficiencies and inconsistent data access. This strained strategic decision-making, user engagement and retention rates while hampering KRAFTON’s use of AI to push the gaming landscape even more. With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, they have increased pipeline throughput and established data governance and access controls to improve efficiency and protect sensitive customer data. With these barriers removed, the game development team is now free to leverage new technologies like generative AI to unlock new gaming innovations.
Managing outdated, disconnected data platforms by different development teams
In the global gaming market, data-driven decision-making and AI are essential to staying creatively competitive. KRAFTON’s relentless innovation and technical expertise helped turn Battlegrounds, one of their flagship games, into a global phenomenon, with 75 million copies sold and over 16 billion hours of playtime consumed. To advance their “Scale Up the Creative” strategy aimed at creating new excitement in games and expanding into the global market, KRAFTON has partnered with various studios to develop over 30 game titles. This collaboration allowed KRAFTON to leverage massive amounts of customer and in-game data to help their partners grow, improve gaming performance and expand their services to customers.
As KRAFTON evolved into both a game developer and a publisher, data volumes and governance issues began to arise, exposing operational inefficiencies among their fragmented teams and partner ecosystem — making it more challenging to be data-driven. Each game development team operated in different data systems, including Amazon EMR, Azure Synapse, Snowflake and in-house tools. Teams had varying data needs — some required basic traffic and revenue data, while others needed detailed performance analytics. The lack of an integrated environment led to complexity in data management and analysis, with multiple platforms such as Tableau, Google Looker, Apache Superset, Redash and Elasticsearch adding to the challenge.
Of all these issues, the most significant obstacle in KRAFTON’s legacy system was their complex data access structure. “We needed a systematic access structure to process data from multiple game companies, but the existing environment lacked proper data access control,” explained Hwaeium Yeom, Head of Data Engineering at KRAFTON.
Implementing a unified approach to data for enhanced gaming efficiency
By adopting the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, KRAFTON unified their data management processes, allowing the company to more effectively handle the immense amount of data generated by their games. KRAFTON can now quickly analyze player behavior, game performance and in-game economics all in one place. The federation of data and centralized access to insights not only sped up decision-making but also enhanced the ability to fine-tune game features and optimize player experiences.
With integrated data environments, efficient data analysis and visualization were now achievable using just two business intelligence tools. “Orchestration, ETL, real-time analytics, AI, data science, data warehousing and business intelligence can all be managed with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform,” Yeom elaborated.
Finally, Unity Catalog enabled KRAFTON to create a comprehensive data governance strategy, integrate their data warehouses into metastores and simplify access management enforced by consistent policies.
Accelerating insights, scaling creativity and securing data
Currently, KRAFTON uses the Databricks Platform to manage over 20 petabytes of data across 20,000+ tables, processing over 60 terabytes of data daily with 100,000 vCPUs. This allows over 2,000 employees to access, analyze and visualize data from over 40 services in a single solution, maximizing data accessibility, utilization and work efficiency.
Databricks has also reduced the time it takes KRAFTON to go from collecting user data to finding insights to under 15 minutes, fostering a culture of faster, effective data-driven decision-making. Plus, systematic data governance ensures that sensitive data is accessible only to authorized groups, enhancing both security and efficiency. “Now all employees can easily access data,” concluded Yeom. “And we’ve established governance to ensure that each game development team’s sensitive data is securely managed.”
Databricks now serves as the data foundation for KRAFTON as they develop new original games based on fantasy novels like “The Bird That Drinks Tears” and increase the efficiency of their “Scale Up the Creative” mission to release new games at scale. Every KRAFTON title is supported by a comprehensive data pipeline built with Databricks, which has reduced costs and increased scalability.
Looking ahead, KRAFTON plans to partner with Databricks to leverage GenAI to tackle even more creative challenges, from customer support to continued focus on creating a private gaming experience. All in all, the goal is to create innovative gameplay and offer users a constantly evolving, connected game world for experiences unlike any other.
