South Korean virtual playground creator leverages Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and MySQL HeatWave to become global blockchain gaming player.
Introduction & Background
SKYPlay, a South Korea-based developer of virtual playgrounds, utilizes blockchain technology to connect users on a single platform. The platform provides games, music, art, digital art, movies, animations, webtoons, and more. SKYPlay has created its own set of crypto assets, known as SKP tokens, which allow users to mint in-game characters and assets, trade with other users, and generate revenue on a secure trading platform.
Business Challenges & Goals
When it launched in 2019, SKYPlay adopted MySQL as its database and chose local provider Naver Cloud as its infrastructure. However, despite the low entry costs and convenience, the platform often suffered from intermittent connectivity and slow performance when accessing services.
The SKYPlay platform, located in South Korea, was also unable to scale beyond the Southeast Asia market. As a fast-growing crypto-gaming entity, SKYPlay aspired to operate globally. The increasing user dissatisfaction due to frequent gaming interruptions propelled SKYPlay to seek an alternative solution.
The company chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and the highly reliable MySQL HeatWave, a fully managed database service, for handling crypto transactions with real-time analytics.
Business Results & Metrics
Running on MySQL HeatWave, the SKYPlay platform achieved a 50% reduction in costs and a significant performance boost that halted the game interruptions and user complaints.
MySQL HeatWave provided the much-needed increase in database performance, which was welcomed by the platform’s 300,000 daily users. The migration to OCI brought relief to SKYPlay’s developers by automating time-consuming tasks such as high-availability management, patching, upgrades, and backups.
MySQL HeatWave’s high availability and scalability now ensure the crucial data integrity needed to handle the millions of cryptocurrency transactions that SKYPlay facilitates every day. This provides improved security and protection of gamers’ assets.
Furthermore, the scalability of OCI has dramatically increased the system’s capability to manage growing workloads. As a result, compute power is being efficiently distributed to multiple virtual machines. This allows for easy vertical and horizontal scaling, using OCI building blocks like load balancing, caching, proxies, and data integration.
Running its workloads and applications on Oracle Cloud regions in Singapore and South Korea allows the virtual playground developer to deliver gaming services globally with maximum uptime and zero data loss tolerance. By replicating MySQL HeatWave across two regions, the SKYPlay platform has established a business continuity and disaster protection strategy.
For developers, MySQL HeatWave’s application programming interfaces (APIs) ensure continuous connectivity for services such as game registration, payments, statistics, and non-fungible token (NFT) transactions. Through such APIs, developers can efficiently implement blockchain-related functionality that would otherwise be challenging.
Data analysis is critical to SKYPlay’s strategy for expanding blockchain gaming. As more games are onboarded, resulting in increased usage and data volumes, MySQL HeatWave’s built-in analytics has transformed into a data lake, providing valuable demand predictions. These predictions are sourced from real-time data on users’ coins, assets, NFT transactions, and other platform-related intelligence.
SKYPlay believes that data-driven decisions are the backbone of its strategic planning. Apart from predicting demand, the data generated by the platform assists in identifying new trends, potential improvements, and future investment areas. It also aids in understanding user behaviors to better cater to their needs and enhance their gaming experience.
Why MySQL HeatWave
SKYPlay has succeeded in delivering a high-performance, secure, and stable gaming environment to users worldwide on a budget. While the cost saving of 50% compared to the previous solution is significant, the assurance of a high-level global service delivery and stringent security setup makes Oracle a desirable partner.
As the SKYPlay platform continues to grow, its journey contributes significantly to the world of digital currencies and gaming. With rich gaming content and increased user engagement, SKYPlay is all set to lead the fast-evolving world of crypto-gaming.
Partner
The new platform was implemented by Albatroz, which has been SKYPlay’s managed service provider since the outset. Albatroz, a long-time integrator of Oracle Cloud solutions, recommended the switchover to MySQL HeatWave on OCI.
“Albatroz has deep understanding of our objectives and is consistently proactive in addressing any customer questions that arise during the usage of the services,” says David Daehyung Kim, Product Owner, SKYPLAY Inc.