Case Study: Super Evil Megacorp achieves immersive, low-latency mobile gaming at scale with Couchbase

Delivering a consistently engaging player experience that can scale quickly and cost-effectively

Super Evil Megacorp, creator of Vainglory — a fast-paced 3v3 mobile MOBA with over 3,000 teams and more than 1 billion matches played — needed a more robust data platform to deliver immersive, low-latency gameplay for tens of millions of players. Their previous system reached 100% workload, limiting scalability and risking downtime that could drive players away, so the team sought a durable, consistent, and cost-effective NoSQL solution.

They migrated to Couchbase after a proof-of-concept showed sub-millisecond latency and comparable response times, deploying global clusters on AWS r3.2xlarge nodes and performing hot migrations to avoid downtime. The new platform supports rapid, cost-effective scaling (up to 10x by adding nodes), reduces hardware needs, enables seven clusters worldwide, is expected to cut monthly database spending by 60–70%, and lets the small engineering team focus more on game innovation; future XDCR may further cut authentication round-trip time.

Super Evil Megacorp

Dwayn Matthies

Senior Platform Engineer