Codemasters case study

The overview

Codemasters, a developer and worldwide publisher of entertainment software, was looking for a top quality datacenter for its online gaming service, including its massively-multiplayer online (MMO) business. It required a datacenter capable of providing superior performance and high availability internet connectivity that made good business sense. In addition, Codemasters was looking for a datacenter that could deliver a ‘green’ service in line with its corporate values and company ethos.

For an internet gaming company, any downtime exerts an immediate, extremely negative impact on the bottom line. Therefore, a dependable connection for Codemasters’ sites was vital. After a comprehensive evaluation of the datacenter market, Codemasters decided to host its servers with Amsterdam-environs based datacenter EvoSwitch.

The organisation

Founded in 1986, Codemasters is a developer and publisher of entertainment software used by game players globally. As one of the largest gaming companies in Britain, Codemasters publishes versions for all gaming platforms including: Microsoft Xbox 360™, Sony® Playstation® 3, Sony Playstation Portable, Nintendo DS, PC-DVD and Nintendo Wii™, and mobile phones.

Codemasters’ Online Division began offering MMO to the gaming community in 2006 with the successful launch of “Dungeons and Dragons Online.” This was followed by a series of popular MMO games including: “RF Online,” “Archlord,” and the most recent, “The Lord of the Rings Online,” which appeared in a free-to-play version in 2010.

What was the requirement?

With four popular games over the past 5 years; a customer base of several million; and up to a hundred thousand concurrent users at times, MMOs have been a substantial element of Codemasters’ very successful business model. Codemasters required a top quality datacenter specifically to host its Online MMO services to stay at the top of its game.

Due to the intense demands of game players, uptime is a critical element to the success of MMO games -- any pause or disruption in connectivity has a direct impact on online gamers, who risk losing data and having their play interrupted if an outage occurs. To keep games fresh and vibrant, Codemasters deliver regular game content updates and enhancements for their MMO games. A loss of connectivity during these updates can delay users from being able to get new content or play the game reflecting badly on the company and costing it customers and revenue.

Loss of connectivity at other times can prevent users from playing at all, seriously impacting Codemasters’ profits. Online games are played 24/7, all year round, apart from very short weekly maintenance windows. Users spend considerable amount of money buying virtual items and subscriptions for their online gaming, round the clock. On line gaming is very much e-commerce in action, and provides a essential, multi-million pound revenue stream for Codemasters’ business.

“We needed a company that could not only meet our commercial requirements, but help meet our gamers’ demands for uninterrupted service,” said Mark Fowlis, Director of Online Services for Codemasters.

“Many datacenters have inadequate connectivity or redundancy, requiring traffic switching from one network route to another for “background” engineering work. While ordinary web traffic would generally not be affected by this, for online games, the transfer of traffic can cause games to be disrupted and users disconnected. We needed a strong relationship with the datacenter we chose to work with us to ensure any planned engineering work, datacenter upgrades, or maintenance could be coordinated with the Codemasters technical team to minimize disruption for our customers. This fundamental understanding of the importance of our business was imperative in our selection of EvoSwitch.”

“We also wanted the datacenter we chose to reflect our environmental ambitions and green approach to business, as well as providing quality execution and personal service. It was essential to partner with an organization that shared the same values as Codemasters,” continued Mark.

Codemasters runs around 400 servers (a mixture of blade servers and rack-mounted servers), two Storage Area Networks (SAN) and other storage including RAMSAN, unified with a resilient network infrastructure.

“We needed a housing solution, which could accommodate our current equipment, and provide responsive options for expansion” said Mark, “We had been let down by previous datacenters promising expansion that was never available when we needed it. Often it took ages to get a response to queries; pricing was unpredictable; and we did not seem to be valued as a customer.”

The selection process

Codemasters carried out an extensive evaluation of EvoSwitch’s facilities, before moving its entire online game hosting operations to the Evoswitch datacenter in August 2008. The excellent internet connectivity available through EvoSwitch; and carbon neutral power supply, with an extremely energy efficient hosting environment was highly enticing to Codemasters. “We wanted a datacenter that could provide cost-effective solutions, while maintaining a very professional level of support,” commented Mark. “All queries and issues we had during the evaluation, agreement, and relocation of our servers, have always been dealt with quickly and easily, giving us confidence in EvoSwitch. The EvoSwitch sales team delivered to Codemasters a well-thought out, personalised solution that exactly met our requirements. We felt that Evoswitch really valued us as a customer.”

    Key factors in the hosting provider selection process included:
  • Central location in Europe near the highly regarded AMS-IX data interexchange hub
  • Close to a major international airport for travel from the UK headquarters
  • Adjacent to major city for speed of equipment parts supply and maintenance
  • Strong Green credentials
  • Scalability and growth potential
  • Flexibility and understanding of unique requirements of online gaming
  • Cost-effective bandwidth and data infrastructure provisioning
  • Highly personal approach and responsiveness

The solution

Based on meeting all the key factors and its helpful, co-operative approach, Codemasters selected EvoSwitch as its datacenter of choice. This solution included 36 racks of hosting space, dual no-break power feeds to all racks (UPS and Generator backup), and dual dedicated 10GB internet connections, as well as a skilled remote hands service.

The benefits

EvoSwitch gives Codemasters peace of mind by providing a reliable and sustainable datacenter environment, offering flexibility of service and a personal approach.

Thanks to the cost effectiveness of EvoSwitch’s offerings, Codemasters has experienced a substantial return on investment by relocating its services to EvoSwitch. “The EvoSwitch sales team understands our requirements, listens to our needs and always endeavours to help. EvoSwitch provides premium services to Codemasters, which are perfectly suited to meet our very demanding requirements. It is a pleasure working with EvoSwitch.” added Mark.