Case Study: Next Games achieves cost savings and global scalability with Microsoft Azure

Next Games born in the cloud to kill zombies

Next Games, a Finland-based studio best known for the mobile hit The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, was born on Microsoft Azure but needed to cut costs, increase server flexibility, and prepare for global growth. With about 16 million installs, 120 GB of new data daily and thousands of database requests per second, the studio needed better global availability, finer control over scaling and rolling updates, and more efficient use of virtual servers to support both long-running workloads and realtime multiplayer ambitions.

Next Games expanded its Azure footprint by adopting Azure Cosmos DB for globally distributed storage and Azure Service Fabric for orchestration, while also using Event Hubs, Media Services, Notification Hubs, Traffic Manager and Web Apps. The move simplified migrations, lowered storage costs, put player data closer to users to reduce latency, enabled safe rolling updates with automatic rollback, and improved scalability and maintainability—positioning the company for future growth and new markets.

Next Games

Kalle Hiitola

Chief Technology Officer