Case Study: Skillz achieves faster, more cost-effective gaming analytics with Pythian and Google BigQuery

Pythian Helps Skillz Make Their Esports Gaming System More Responsive And Cost Effective With Google Bigquery

Skillz, a leading mobile esports platform, was facing rapidly growing data volumes, rising storage costs, and latency issues in analytics as its user base expanded. The company needed a more responsive, cost-effective data warehouse and near real-time ingestion from MySQL to better understand player activity. Pythian helped Skillz evaluate and modernize its analytics stack using Google BigQuery.

Pythian implemented the migration and proof of concept on Google BigQuery, including syncing data from MySQL and moving Redshift-based ETLs to BigQuery and Dataflow. The result was faster, more reliable analytics with significant cost savings; some queries ran up to 10x faster than on Redshift, dropping from hours to minutes and enabling more timely personalization, fraud detection, and cheater prevention.

Skillz

Miriam Aguirre

VP Engineering