nexon Saves $4.5 Million Dollars A Year by Unifying its Data in the AI Data Cloud

We live in a world defined by hyper-connectivity. Online gaming has transformed from a niche hobby for the minority, to a mainstream phenomenon.

For 30+ years, Nexon has been a pioneer in the world of interactive entertainment software, delivering some of the world’s most popular games to over 1.9 billion gamers in 190 countries, including titles such as MapleStory, Dungeon & Fighter, and KartRider.

As you can imagine with over 25 million active users every month, Nexon processes a tremendous amount of data in near real-time both from the games, but also the surrounding services. To put that in context, we process 45 billion logs per day, amounting to over 100 terabytes of data ingested.

Historically, whenever we developed a new game, we aimed to incorporate the latest technologies. But as a result, each game operated on a different technical stack, which created data silos and fragmentation within our business.

Working in close partnership with the team at Snowflake, we built a new platform called ‘Monolake’, which stands for a Monolithic Data Lake, built on top of the Snowflake platform.

Monolake completely changed our data strategy, unifying our data silos into a single platform, democratizing access via data mesh, and in the process, empowering over 2,000 data producers and consumers. By providing data securely and freely to everyone in the business, we are able to transform into an agile organization and adapt swiftly to the ever-changing landscape of the era of AI.

Since deploying the Snowflake platform, we have improved query performance by 770% and have reduced infrastructure costs by up to $4.5 million dollars per year, compared to our previous platform.

We are currently in the process of migrating our managed Spark workloads across to Snowpark for increased efficiency, and as our partnership with Snowflake continues to develop, we are excited about the potential opportunities with Artificial Intelligence, and the Polaris catalog which will enable cross-engine interoperability.

In a huge data lake where we had been swimming aimlessly, Snowflake became the compass for Nexon.

As we look to the future, we remain laser-focused on providing enjoyment and unparalleled experiences to our gaming community - with Snowflake as a trusted partner in delivering on that promise!