Case Study: SEGA HARDlight achieves simplified ops and seamless scaling for millions of mobile gamers with MongoDB Atlas (MongoDB)

SEGA HARDlight Migrates to MongoDB Atlas to Simplify Ops and Improve Experience for Millions of Mobile Gamers

SEGA HARDlight, SEGA’s UK mobile studio behind Sonic and other iconic titles, was outgrowing its legacy MySQL stack as games added always-on features and account-based data. Popular launches produce extreme, short-lived traffic spikes and required heavy provisioning and database tuning, straining a small ops team and risking outages.

HARDlight migrated to MongoDB Atlas on AWS, gaining horizontal scaling, managed operations, monitoring and point-in-time backups so a two-person DevOps team could handle massive launches. The move let a 3-shard Atlas cluster support millions of players for Sonic Forces with low latency and no service interruptions, enabling smoother launches and faster development for future games.

SEGA HARDlight

Yordan Gyurchev

Technical Director