Case Study: Sneaky Games achieves rapid on-demand scalability and reduced costs with Microsoft Azure

Game Developer Reduces Costs and Achieves On-Demand Scalability with Cloud Solution

Sneaky Games is an Austin-based independent developer of social and mobile role-playing games with 22 employees. The company struggled with costly, time-consuming maintenance and slow scaling on hosted infrastructure (Rackspace) and found Amazon EC2 still required heavy manual management—limitations that threatened its ability to handle viral, unpredictable user spikes without hiring additional IT staff.

Sneaky Games moved its platform to Microsoft Azure’s PaaS, reengineered its engine to use Azure Blob Storage, web/worker roles, Azure Caching and SQL Azure, and adopted a pay-as-you-go model. The result: rapid on-demand scalability (new load‑balanced instances in under 10 minutes), the ability to absorb sudden user growth, simplified IT maintenance, reduced infrastructure and personnel costs (for example, cutting infrastructure by 50% in one instance), and faster time to market for new games.

Sneaky Games

Mark Bourland

Chief Technology Officer