Case Study: Z2 achieves faster, lower-cost game analytics and real-time insights with Amazon Redshift

Z2 - Customer Case Study

Z2 is a Seattle-based studio that builds multiplayer, free-to-play mobile games enjoyed by more than 55 million players across roughly 3 billion sessions. To deliver real-time, low-latency multiplayer gameplay worldwide and to mine gameplay data for product and support improvements, Z2 needed a scalable, globally distributed infrastructure and an analytics pipeline that could handle large volumes of event data.

Z2 runs its game servers and services on AWS—about 120 Amazon EC2 instances across eight Regions, CloudFront in 43 edge locations, Amazon S3, RDS, Route 53, ELB, IAM, and an analytics stack using SQS and Amazon Redshift storing hundreds of TB. By using compute-optimized instances, custom AMIs, DevOps automation and a high percentage of Reserved Instances, Z2 achieved low-latency global play, fast scaling for traffic spikes, and significantly lower analytics hosting costs, enabling the team to focus on game features and player experience.

Z2

Markus Schweig

Director Live Operations