CockroachDB meets the Gaming Industry

CockroachDB is proving to be a highly successful database in the world of online gaming. Many games companies support and actively promote the use of CockroachDB to develop your games and store your players "in-play" data and subscription details.

Online gaming relies heavily on real-time data processing and storage, which requires a fast, reliable, and scalable database solution running in the background.

Let's look at some of the specifics;

From a players perspective, Online gaming platforms need to store a large amount of player data, including account information, game progress, in-game purchases, and player statistics. A good database solution can handle this data efficiently, ensuring that it is easily accessible and protected against loss or corruption.

Everything needs to be now and real-time. This goal requires the need to process and store real-time updates from players, including movements, chat messages, and actions within the game. A good database solution has to handle these updates quickly and consistently, ensuring that all players have a smooth and fair gaming experience.

Downtime is bad. Platforms need to be highly available, as downtime or lag can cause player frustration and churn. A good database solution can provide high availability, ensuring that the game remains operational even in the face of hardware failures or other issues.

Lets look at why CockroachDB is such a popular choice if you are a games developer and want to ensure your games will offer the customer experience you need.

1. Scalability: CockroachDB is designed to scale horizontally across multiple nodes and data centres, allowing gaming companies to easily handle massive amounts of data and traffic as their user base grows. This makes it an ideal solution for online gaming platforms that require high availability and low latency.
2. Consistency: CockroachDB uses a unique consistency model called "serialisable snapshot isolation" that ensures that data is consistent across all nodes and transactions. This makes it easier for gaming companies to build and maintain reliable gaming experiences that are fair and consistent for all players.
3. Data durability: CockroachDB is built with a strong focus on data durability, ensuring that all data is safely stored and protected from loss or corruption. This is particularly important for gaming companies that need to store player data and game progress information.
4. Easy deployment: CockroachDB can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise, providing gaming companies with flexibility in how they manage their databases. This makes it easier for gaming companies to set up and maintain their databases, freeing up more time to focus on building great games.
5. Cost-effective: CockroachDB is a cost-effective solution compared to other database vendors in the gaming industry, with transparent pricing and no hidden costs.

CockroachDB is already running and supporting some of the best and most popular games on the market

Here are just some examples of where you can find CockroachDB enhancing the gamers experience:

1. TreesPlease Games: TreesPlease Games view CockroachDB’s ability to deploy across multi-regions will definitely be an advantage when it comes to keeping server response times reasonable while reaching a global audience.
2. Mythical Games: Mythical Games, currently valued at $1.25 billion, is one of the top 5 blockchain gaming startups. The four year-old company is part of a relatively niche industry with tremendous potential for growth – blockchain (or crypto) gaming presents opportunities for innovation in areas such as player ownership and player-led economies at scale.
3. Devsisters: Devsisters, the developer of Cookie Run: Kingdom, even with the game generating six times the workload Devsisters anticipated, CockroachDB has made it easy for them to keep up.
4. Heroic Labs: Heroic Labs depend on CockroachDB for  its core principles: referential integrity, transactional support, all the transaction semantics and ACID compliance.

Overall, CockroachDB's scalability, consistency, high availability, ease of deployment, and cost-effectiveness make it an attractive choice for gaming companies looking for a reliable database solution that can handle their unique requirements.

Thank you for reading!