Case Study: SEGA HARDlight simplifies operations and improves mobile gamer experience with MongoDB Atlas

SEGA HARDlight scales to millions of mobile gamers with MongoDB Atlas

SEGA HARDlight, a mobile game development studio for SEGA, faced challenges with scaling its popular mobile games like Sonic Dash and Crazy Taxi: City Rush. Its legacy Java and MySQL stack, hosted in its own data center, struggled with the massive, spikey traffic surges following new game launches, leading to service outages. The studio needed a highly scalable and flexible database solution to support online features and player account data, which did not fit well in a traditional relational model.

The vendor MongoDB provided its fully-managed cloud database service, MongoDB Atlas. This solution offered advanced operational tooling, point-in-time backups, and horizontal scalability on AWS, allowing a small two-person DevOps team to manage complex loads effortlessly. The results included a frictionless launch for games like Sonic Forces: Speed Battle, where a three-shard Atlas cluster handled millions of gamers with stable, low-latency performance and zero service interruptions. MongoDB enabled successful big launches from the start, replacing the outdated infrastructure with a modern, reliable platform.

SEGA HARDlight