Case Study: Riot Games achieves faster data discovery and boosts analyst & engineer productivity with Alation

Gaming Company Taps Alation to Improve Analyst Productivity and Data Engineer Workflow

Riot Games, the maker of League of Legends and one of the world’s largest gaming companies with over 150 million registered users, faced a classic data-at-scale problem: an expanding Databricks lakehouse on AWS S3 produced vast amounts of tables and datasets, but analysts struggled to find trusted data for Tableau reports while engineers were repeatedly answering the same questions. Riot needed a single, searchable place to document metadata and enable analyst self-service without slowing engineers’ workflows.

Riot adopted the Alation data intelligence platform to centralize metadata, provide Google-like search, schema/column-level exploration, lineage, and direct Tableau query/reporting. Alation’s event-based metadata extraction (MDE) API—triggered via AWS Glue—syncs Databricks changes to the catalog in near real-time so engineers can annotate new tables within minutes (metadata tasks that once took ~24 hours now take under 5 minutes). The result: faster analyst insights, fewer engineer interruptions, improved efficiency, and a roadmap to embed data-use policies for stronger data protection.

Riot Games

Michael Leslie

Senior Data Governance Architect