Industries

Gaming

Real-time backends and live-ops data that survive a launch day.

A live game is a distributed system with a player-facing clock on it. The studios that keep players are the ones that can answer "what happened in the last ten minutes" — not the ones with the biggest warehouse. We build the ingest, the identity model and the live-ops surface as one thing, because retrofitting them after a hit launch is how studios lose the window.

Book A Call Run the numbers first

Google Cloud for games

BigQuery as the warehouse, Pub/Sub and Dataflow for streaming, Spanner and Memorystore for the game backend, Vertex AI and BigQuery ML for segmentation and churn. Reference architectures and quota conversations matter more than they sound on launch week.

01 · Build

Cloud Spanner · Memorystore

A game backend that holds on launch day.
02 · Understand

Pub/Sub · Dataflow · BigQuery

Billions of events a day through one tolerant schema.
03 · Activate

BigQuery ML · Vertex AI

Segmentation, churn and offers from the same data.
04 · Operate

Live-ops configuration

A designer responds on a Friday night without a deploy.

+22.6%: email marketing performance at a top gaming company in SG after a unified player data platform; Source: Client engagement, anonymised
+11.2%: game completion and retention improvement in the same programme; Source: Client engagement, anonymised

SASB TC-IM — Internet Media & Services

SASB standards ↗

Gaming has no standalone SASB standard; live-service games sit closest to TC-IM. The material lines are infrastructure energy (including player-device estimated use) and player data.

TC-IM-130a.1
Infrastructure energy

total energy (GJ), % grid, % renewable

Server fleet and cloud billing joined to concurrent-player curves, so intensity per CCU is reportable.
TC-IM-130a.2
Water use

water withdrawn (m³), % in high-stress regions

Data-centre region factors applied to workload placement — useful for the architecture decision, not just the report.
TC-IM-220a.1
Player privacy

% of player records used for secondary purposes

Consent and age-gating as first-class fields, which also protects you in a minors-and-loot-boxes review.
TC-IM-230a.1
Data security

breach count, % involving account or payment data

Account takeover attempts and credential-stuffing events are already in your logs; the disclosure follows from instrumenting them.

Sustainability disclosures, their SASB code, the metric and how we would instrument it
Standard	KPI	Metric	How we instrument it
`TC-IM-130a.1`	Infrastructure energy	total energy (GJ), % grid, % renewable	Server fleet and cloud billing joined to concurrent-player curves, so intensity per CCU is reportable.
`TC-IM-130a.2`	Water use	water withdrawn (m³), % in high-stress regions	Data-centre region factors applied to workload placement — useful for the architecture decision, not just the report.
`TC-IM-220a.1`	Player privacy	% of player records used for secondary purposes	Consent and age-gating as first-class fields, which also protects you in a minors-and-loot-boxes review.
`TC-IM-230a.1`	Data security	breach count, % involving account or payment data	Account takeover attempts and credential-stuffing events are already in your logs; the disclosure follows from instrumenting them.

Where we help

Event ingest that keeps up: Billions of events a day through Pub/Sub and Dataflow into BigQuery, with a schema that tolerates client and platform drift instead of dropping the batch.
Player identity and segmentation: Cross-platform identity resolved once, so retention, spend and content telemetry describe one player rather than three app installs.
Live ops without a deploy: Offers, events and A/B allocation driven by configuration and segmentation, so a designer can respond to a retention dip on a Friday night.

Working on something in Gaming?

A 30-minute call is usually enough to work out whether this is a quick win or a rebuild — and we will tell you if it is the second one before you spend anything.

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Calculator

What is one retention point worth?

In a live-service game, D30 is a revenue multiplier. Model what a few points are worth against your UA spend.