Case Study: Cloud Imperium Games achieves scalable, real-time player analytics with Akka Data Pipelines

Cloud Imperium Games Harnesses Player Analytics to Build Compelling Experiences with Akka Data Pipelines

Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), the studio behind Star Citizen and Squadron 42, runs a direct-to-consumer model that gives it rich, real-time visibility into player behavior. As player activity exploded, CIG’s original analytics pipeline—built on a FaaS platform and Python scripts—became costly to operate, difficult to maintain, and struggled with performance and rapid requests for new metrics.

CIG rearchitected its analytics with Akka/Cloudflow and subscribed to Akka Data Pipelines, ingesting real-time events via AWS Kinesis and historical data via Firehose to S3, processed by Akka streamlets. The new platform was quick to deploy (one engineer), backed by Lightbend support, and delivered predictable scaling, faster turnaround on analytics requests (including replaying six months of data), and helped attract engineering talent.

Cloud Imperium Games

Miles Lee

Director, Build Operations