Case Study: Square Enix Co., Ltd. achieves near-instant screenshot processing and about 95% cost reduction with Amazon Web Services (AWS Lambda)

Square Enix Co., Ltd. - Customer Case Study

Square Enix, maker of major game franchises like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, faced a scaling challenge with Dragon Quest X’s popular in‑game screenshot feature. Normally 200–300 images arrive per minute, but during events this spiked to as much as 6,000/min, and server‑side sequential processing could leave players waiting three to four hours to view screenshots—hurting customer experience and limiting growth.

Square Enix migrated image processing to AWS: on‑premises servers upload images to Amazon S3, an S3 event triggers AWS Lambda to process images, and results are sent to Amazon SQS for import back to on‑premises storage. The change cut processing from hours to about 10 seconds during peak loads, reduced costs to roughly one‑twentieth of the on‑premises cost, and eliminated much operational overhead while enabling essentially unlimited scaling.

Square Enix Co., Ltd.

Daisuke Agata

Technical Director, Business Division No. 6