Case Study: Nintendo & DeNA achieve 80M+ worldwide downloads and zero downtime with Amazon Web Services

Nintendo Dena - Customer Case Study

Nintendo partnered with DeNA to bring its iconic IP to smart devices with the global launch of Super Mario Run, aiming to expand beyond traditional console users. The team faced a tight timeline and a major technical challenge: deliver a simultaneous release across 150+ countries while handling extreme, short-term traffic spikes and meeting diverse international data‑protection requirements—despite finalizing infrastructure plans only about two months before launch.

They migrated the game backend to AWS, using EC2, VPC, S3, Elastic Load Balancing, sharded databases across Availability Zones, and monitoring/authorization with CloudWatch and IAM, and ran intensive load testing with AWS Enterprise Support. The cloud approach enabled rapid deployment, scalable performance, and reduced operational overhead; the launch was stable (40 million downloads in four days, 80 million by March 2017), expanded to Android and 165 countries, and delivered the expected global reach without infrastructure failures.

Nintendo Dena

Kenichi Takemoto

Team Lead, Business System Development Group, Smart Devices Department, Business Development Division