Case Study: ELEX achieves scalable, low-cost real-time chat for 300,000+ concurrent users with Google Cloud Platform

ELEX Supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent chat users

ELEX, a Beijing-based mobile games publisher founded in 2008 and known for the hit Clash of Kings (about 200 million downloads), needed a more reliable, scalable chat platform to support a global, multilingual player community. Rapid growth strained servers and an initial translation tool proved unstable, so ELEX required a solution that could handle peaks of up to 300,000 concurrent chat users per second, reduce ops overhead, and provide global presence.

ELEX migrated its chat service to Google Compute Engine and adopted the Google Cloud Translation API, enabling high-quality real-time translation and on‑demand scaling of virtual instances. The move delivered reliable real-time chat across languages, cut infrastructure costs by about 20%, reduced system administration workload, and helped build a stronger player community that supports ongoing game growth and revenue.

Elex

Hu Chao

Product Manager