Live monitoring of in-game data at 2K Games implemented through AWS and Rockset
In the ever-evolving world of interactive entertainment, 2K Games continues to push the boundaries of innovation under the leadership of Technical Director, Sanju Sriram. Known for his commitment to excellence, Sanju ensures a seamless and immersive gaming experience for players at 2K Games.
On a recent webinar, Sanju shared insights on best practices and architectures for real-time game telemetry, emphasizing the importance of this data in improving player experience and operational insight. Accompanying him were industry veterans Andrei Muratov and Julie Mills, who brought their wealth of experience to the table.
Andrei Muratov, with his 20 years in the games industry, has worn many hats, from artist to producer, game designer, analyst, and leader of global analytics teams. Today, he is the Business Development and Solutions lead for Game Analytics and AI/ML for Games at AWS, with a mission to develop solutions and enable game developer success with analytics and AIML at all levels of the industry.
Julie Mills, Director of Product Marketing at Rockset, a search and analytics database built for the cloud, partners with gaming companies to understand their technical and business requirements for search, analytics, and AI-powered applications on streaming data.
The webinar, moderated by Alissa McAloon, Publisher of our website with a decade of experience in the video game industry and media, focused on the following key best practices and architectural insights:
- Proactive Player Support Using Telemetry: Top gaming studios use real-time telemetry to anticipate player frustration and intervene before churn occurs. This involves monitoring signals such as sudden spikes in disconnects, repeated mission failures, and session drops after certain events. Detecting these early enables studios to engage players proactively, improving retention and lifetime value.
- Escalation Paths from Support to Community and Dev Teams: When telemetry identifies widespread issues or negative sentiment—e.g., repeated tickets about bugs or social media spikes mentioning "broken"—support agents escalate quickly to community managers and developers to contain the problem and prevent public backlash or churn.
- Robust Telemetry Pipelines: Efficient telemetry systems route data into specialized processing chains to optimize data volume and speed. This ensures that relevant telemetry is captured and acted on in near-real-time while managing costs and scalability.
- Unified Observability Architecture: Combining application performance monitoring (APM) with unified telemetry standards like OpenTelemetry enables a single integrated view of system health. This approach reduces tool fragmentation and accelerates insights, facilitating faster response to player-impacting issues.
- Data-Driven Threat Detection (Relevant to Telemetry Security): Using telemetry for real-time threat hunting and anomaly detection provides additional assurance for gaming environments against external attacks or fraud.
These practices allow gaming studios to detect, analyze, and resolve issues rapidly, enhancing player retention and satisfaction. The featured webinar by Sanju Sriram, Andrei Muratov, and Julie Mills highlights developing these architectures alongside operational best practices to maximize the value of telemetry in live game environments.
2K Games, for instance, has built their architecture on AWS and Rockset to enable high-volume ingestion and indexing of telemetry events. The webinar discussed these architectures and best practices in detail, offering valuable insights for gaming studios and enthusiasts alike.
Data-and-cloud-computing technologies play a crucial role in the architectures built by gaming studios, such as 2K Games, for efficient telemetry management. The seamless integration of these technologies, like AWS and Rockset, allows for high-volume ingestion and indexing of telemetry events, enhancing the overall performance and player experience.
Sanju Sriram, Technical Director at 2K Games, emphasized the importance of technology in optimizing data collection and analysis during a recent webinar, demonstrating the interactive entertainment industry's growing reliance on technology to drive innovation and improve player experience.
