www.burda-ic.com

solutions:

• Akamai ESD For Gaming

DOWNLOAD BURDA-IC GAMES CASE STUDY

• Improved game download completions up to 87% in Western countries, a 20% increase.
• Achieved peer offload rates of more than 90%.
• Increased download initiations as much as 20%.
• Boosted download completion rates by 20%.
• Grew average revenue per player.
• Almost doubled the user base from 5 million to nearly 10 million.
• Improved the bottom line while maintaining marketing spend rates.

Burda:ic, a subsidiary of Hubert Burda Media Group, is an innovative publisher of multi- player online PC games. Established almost a decade ago, Burda:ic helped introduce the concept of monetizing free-to-play games through in-game sales of virtual goods. Despite the high quality of its immersive games, Burda:ic faced formidable competition from lower-quality, browser-based games. Requiring users to only have a browser, these competitors offered instant gaming satisfaction to anyone with an Internet connection without the burden of performing a large-file client download.

Since its inception, Burda:ic managed the delivery and performance of its client downloads and games on its own. The company located a download server in a datacenter, and as the number of games increased, it deployed separate dedicated servers for downloads and games to improve delivery time. Burda:ic clustered rented download servers to aggregate bandwidth in 100 Mbps increments and used round-robin logic to balance user traffic across different servers. While this solution proved cost-efficient, it delivered unacceptably low Quality of Service (QOS). Moreover, staff had to constantly monitor and make adjustments to the infrastructure as business growth drove up operational complexity in the datacenter.

Burda:ic recognized the need to engage a service provider that could boost client-side download performance and ensure that the client was sufficiently mirrored to perform well across multiple continents.

Burda:ic initiated an open beta test of several hybrid client-side/ client-server delivery solutions, including Akamai’s Electronic Service Delivery (ESD) for GamingTM solution. Burda:ic configured Akamai ESD’s Download Manager to meet a specific QOS threshold. If downloads dropped below 80% peer efficiency, the Download Manager would switch to the Akamai EdgePlatform network of 73,000 servers for HTTP delivery of the Burda:ic client.

Using the analytics Akamai developed in the beta and incorporated into the standard ESD for Gaming product, Burda:ic was able to prove the success of Florensia, their new game. Download initiations increased 15-20%, download completion rates also rose 15-20%, and the average revenue per player also grew. For Burda:ic, new user acquisitions and the bottom line grew while marketing spend remained fixed. Today, Burda:ic is on track to surpass 10-million gamers worldwide as it prepares to release its next blockbuster, "ARGO".