Case Study: Halo (343 Industries) achieves rapid player insights and scalable analytics with Microsoft Azure HDInsight

343 Industries Gets New User Insights from Big Data in the Cloud

343 Industries, the team that develops Halo 4, faced the challenge of mining massive gameplay data housed in Microsoft Azure to gain business intelligence about player behavior, support the five‑week Infinity Challenge tournament, detect cheaters, and run targeted retention campaigns — all while scaling infrastructure quickly and avoiding cross‑datacenter costs.

The team implemented Microsoft Azure HDInsight Service (Apache Hadoop) with Azure services to convert and store raw game data in Avro/BLOB storage and surface insights through PowerPivot and Hive ODBC. Daily processing of millions of events enabled weekly game updates, real‑time tournament leaderboard feeds for Virgin Gaming, automated cheater detection, and customized email campaigns — delivering faster response times, improved player retention, and actionable BI accessible to non‑engineers.

Halo

Mark Vayman

Lead Program Manager