Case Study: ESL (Turtle Entertainment) secures custom game protocols and cuts page load times up to 70% with Cloudflare

Shields Up Turtle Entertainment Secures Custom Protocols With Cloudflare

Turtle Entertainment Online (part of ESL), operator of the ESEA gaming platform with ~2.5 million users, faced frequent large-scale DDoS attacks, malicious bot activity (credential stuffing and content scraping), and poor page load times for globally distributed gamers. Complicating mitigation, some critical services ran on a proprietary low-latency TCP/UDP protocol that conventional security tools could not protect without harming performance.

TEO deployed Cloudflare Spectrum to extend fast DDoS protection to custom TCP/UDP protocols, Argo Smart Routing to cut average Time to First Byte by more than 50% (with page downloads up to 70% faster), and Cloudflare Bot Management to identify and block malicious bots and enable targeted rate limiting. The combined solution delivered near-instant mitigation for attacks, improved global performance and reliability, and required minimal configuration from TEO’s engineering teams.

ESL

Ben Burns

Chief Information Officer