LINE GAMES Runs Its Global Infrastructure on AWS To Deliver Richer Customer Experiences

LINE GAMES develops and publishes mobile and PC games. Since the launch of Dragon Flight in 2012, one of the 1st generation Kakao games, LINE GAMES has been leading the market with global release of other games on the cross platform FLOOR, including Destiny Child, Buried Stars, Exos Heroes and Undecember. Undecember, released in 2022, ranked 1st in the most popular games category in both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Its hottest new game, ‘Uncharted Waters – Origin’ is about to go global. ‘Uncharted Waters – Origin’ is an open-world massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) title released to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the launch of ‘Uncharted Waters’ series and is offered on both mobile and PC.

Dragon Flight is a popular shooter game by LINE GAMES. On release, it ranked 1st in the free app download category, for sales in both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. It has seen more than 25 million cumulative downloads to date. Given its exponential growth, LINE GAMES found it hard to scale the service, handle traffic flexibly, run services overseas and ensure security in a domestic Internet Data Center (IDC) environment. In addition, as the number of titles published by LINE GAMES grew, it needed a large number of servers in different countries, and faced challenges like building an elastic infrastructure to cater for changes in traffic volume, ensuring security, and optimizing costs. As its AWS users rapidly increased to operate dozens of games, governance and security settings for each game had to be managed independently, taking up too much resources. LINE GAMES needed to solve for centralizing access management and automating manual system updates. 

LINE GAMES chose AWS for its global infrastructure and rich customer experience. It migrated Dragon Flight from an on-premises environment to AWS, and started developing and servicing all its games on AWS.

JangSu Yang from LINE GAMES’ Infrastructure team said, “We chose AWS for its reliable services and the vast collection of customer references it can provide. All our games are now operating on AWS.”

LINE GAMES uses AWS Organization for account management, which allows for central management of multi-accounts and enhanced security. AWS Directory Service lets LINE GAMES maximize operational efficiency without significantly changing how it currently uses the directory service. By integrating this approach with AWS Single Sign-On, LINE GAMES could unify a complex verification process, and simplify the management of segmented access. Services such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS WAF and AWS CloudFormation were used for automated management and monitoring. LINE GAMES can now run workloads with a stack-based permission management policies using this architecture design. These workloads use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon OpenSearch Service for availability, durability, and reliability to build an elastic architecture. Solutions like Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda provide static/dynamic web content globally, and help LINE GAMES build a reliable service environment with low latency and high throughput.

After its first successful migration to AWS in 2016, LINE GAMES has subsequently moved all its games and platforms to the AWS environment. It currently runs over 30 games globally, with more to be released to the global market.

JangSu Yang said, “We wouldn’t have been able to run dozens of games globally if we stayed on-premise, especially with limited manpower; we’d need much more development resources than what we have. AWS allows fast provisioning of multiple services, giving us the flexibility to quickly respond to the fast-changing game market.”

By leveraging AWS’s managed services, the company has freed up its engineers’ time to focus on core tasks. This lets them service a large number of games with limited manpower, and helped half game development time. They were also able to exercise flexibility, depending on time and location, to reduce infrastructure operation cost.

LINE GAMES is leveraging AWS Enterprise Support, AWS Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) and AWS Activate Program for 24/7 tech support, environment status management, architecture design, and cost support. Should there be an issue, AWS’s dedicated account team will quickly identify the cause and provide suggestions for resolution. LINE GAMES also provides active feedback to AWS through the PFR (Product Feature Requests) process to let AWS know the kind of features they need during the course of development and operation.

Seil Sung, CTO, LINE GAMES, said, “We were able to venture into the global market despite our limited resources with the help of AWS. By using AWS’s proven solutions, we could develop and service games without much difficulties. This has convinced us that the cloud is no longer optional—it has become a must.”

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