Case Study: Jelly Button achieves 70M-player scale and 60% cost savings with MongoDB

How a 520% Increase in Players Sparked Online Gaming Platform Pirate Kings Migration to MongoDB Professional and Cloud Manager

Jelly Button Games, a Tel Aviv–based free-to-play mobile studio behind Pirate Kings, faced a sudden 520% user surge that exposed severe latency and scaling limits in their third‑party MongoDB hosting. As the game ballooned from about a million daily users to millions more, the hosted service couldn’t resolve performance problems, forcing the team to reevaluate their database strategy.

Working with MongoDB Professional Services and Cloud Manager, Jelly Button migrated to MongoDB 3.2 with the WiredTiger storage engine in under two months, compressing 18 shards into a single replica set and reducing on-disk data by 60%. The replatform delivered 60% cost savings, improved telemetry, managed backups and 24x7 support, enabled the team to reliably serve over 70 million players (about 10 million monthly uniques), simplify operations, and confidently build future games on MongoDB.

Jelly Button

Shai Zonis

Senior Server Developer