SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 13, 2012) - Joyent, the high-performance cloud infrastructure company for real-time applications, today announced a partnership with Digital Chocolate, a leading provider of social games across growing platforms, to dramatically improve overall gameplay while cutting infrastructure costs in half. By moving its social and mobile games to the Joyent Cloud, Digital Chocolate significantly decreased its cost per daily active user while maintaining high service level agreements (SLA) for its customers.
Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins launched Digital Chocolate in 2003 to take advantage of the potential he saw in social games. The company quickly rose to the top of the market, rapidly launching hit games and quickly achieving success in a critical metric for online gaming companies: daily active users (DAUs). But as the company grew, so did its infrastructure costs and the complexity of managing those costs. Profitability for each title wasn't dependent solely on title DAU growth. Another large factor was the underlying cost to service different types of players in different regions, with differing gameplay habits.
"As we switched to a Games-as-a-Service model, we had to deal with a growing and shifting global audience that carried its own micro-P&L by game, geo, even player pool," said Jason Loia, COO at Digital Chocolate. "Accommodating our very sector-specific needs can be a tall order, because they don't fit into the traditional one-size-fits-all menu of cloud services. In order to manage the complexity, we needed a provider that could grow with our business needs, and with Joyent, we've found a model that enables us to manage the business to our desired level of granularity, not the provider's."
By moving to the Joyent Cloud, Digital Chocolate was able to solve this demand by utilizing Joyent Cloud's zero-latency architecture, which not only supports diverse gameplay and high-volume peaks, but also noticeably improves overall gaming experience as well. In addition, Joyent's cloud architecture -- unparalleled for its efficiency, performance and visibility -- cut the company's infrastructure costs in half. Digital Chocolate's transition to Joyent quickly improved the profitability of its existing games, putting the company in a healthy position for sustainable growth. The company can now focus on what it does best -- develop new and, well, highly addictive games.
"Companies taking advantage of the cloud today need an infrastructure that can quickly and effectively scale up or down at a moment's notice," said Jason Hoffman, Founder and CTO, Joyent. "We've built Joyent Cloud to withstand even the most aggressive usage spikes so companies like Digital Chocolate can reduce their costs while still achieving drastic improvements in reliability and performance."
In addition to reducing infrastructure costs, Joyent also provided service level guarantees that exceeded Digital Chocolate's previous provider, all while delivering seamless performance.
About Digital Chocolate
Digital Chocolate was the number one software company in App Store downloads in 2009, and was one of the fastest-growing publishers of Facebook social games with virtual goods in 2010. The company was founded in 2003 by Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, and has 300 employees. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Digital Chocolate works with 200 leading web and mobile channel partners in 80 countries, and has game design operations in Finland, Spain, India, and Mexico.
About Joyent
Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering enterprises and developers the best public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure for today's demanding real-time applications. The Joyent Cloud delivers public cloud services to some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Digital Chocolate, LinkedIn, Voxer and ModCloth. Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript project owned and stewarded by Joyent, provides developers and enterprises such as Microsoft with the most powerful runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps. Joyent is also the key contributor to and sponsor of Joyent SmartOS, an open source project dedicated to the complete, modern operating system. SmartDataCenter orchestrates Joyent's technologies into a cohesive, reliable and distributed system that can stand up to the compute demands of the modern world. The Global Cloud Network (GCN), an ecosystem of leading cloud service providers, extend Joyent's high-performance cloud infrastructure capabilities to EMEA, India and Asia to enable companies to leverage the same performance, resiliency, security and visibility. For more information visit http://www.joyent.com.