Playfish.com case study
In less than two years Playfish has become one of the worlds’ leading and fastest growing social games companies, changing the way people play games online by providing more social and connected experiences.
By combining creativity, innovation and originality when creating games for friends to play over social and mobile platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bebo, iPhone and Android, the company has become hugely successful. So much so that Playfish approached GlobalGold in November 2008 seeking a solution to the sheer volume of rapidly increasing traffic that was beginning to overwhelm the company’s game forums.
GlobalGold rapidly analysed Playfish’s situation and recommended the use of vBulletin software, which is reknown worldwide for its ability to scale with ease and to handle large volumes of traffic. vBulletin also was an ideal solution since it had a large third-party developer community who have developed a huge range of plug-ins to enhance and extend its functionality.
GlobalGold started internal discussions based on hosting approximately 5,000 concurrent online users on vBulletin. Through experience gained from current clients, GlobalGold was able to assemble a simple yet powerful solution to handle Playfish’s forum traffic. A proposal was delivered to Playfish within two days of initial discussions and the solution was accepted, implemented and tested within one week.
Since the end of November 2008 the forum has suffered from one downtime incidence where both immediate and managed vBulletin support was required. This was caused by a surge in responses to an email marketing campaign, which went out to more that 1 million users simultaneously, causing a massive spike in inbound traffic. Once notified, the GlobalGold team immediately enabled additional resources and implemented a number of website optimisations to keep the site running with marginal downtime within just minutes.
Playfish’s game forums have now grown to encompass nearly 10 million posts, approximately half a million threads, more than 172,000 registered users and an instance of having almost 10,000 online users at the same time.
GlobalGold is wholly committed to providing reliable and robust forum hosting solutions.
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