Founded in 2013, CTW Inc. is Japan's No. 1 IP game platform company responsible for the G123 platform. The platform specializes in instant-play HTML5 games, eliminating the need for downloads or registration. With its seamless user experience and premium gaming content, the platform has experienced rapid growth, boasting a staggering 50 million subscribers. The company continues to expand its global footprint by working closely with game developers and actively utilizing a beloved art style to deliver IP anime games for their fans.

CTW prioritizes operations driven by data and technology, leveraging cloud computing and AI to enhance marketing, user acquisition, and platform stability.

Before collaborating with Alibaba Cloud, G123 encountered several significant operational challenges:

• Scalability: Legacy infrastructure struggled with high concurrent traffic and lacked elastic scaling capabilities.

• Infrastructure costs: Self-managed servers incurred high costs and exhibited uneven resource utilization.

• Global latency: Players experienced delays and data interoperability issues due to limited geographic coverage.

• Security: The platform faced security risks, particularly DDoS attacks, which compromise platform integrity.

After migrating to Alibaba Cloud's Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), IP games on G123 encountered new challenges related to cloud-native complexities. These challenges included managing application states and resolving detection issues with newly launched servers.

Key factors driving CTW's decision to go with Alibaba Cloud:

• Performance and elasticity: Large-scale data centers located in Asia (especially in Tokyo) greatly minimize latency for regional users, while their agile scalability effectively manages traffic spikes.

• Proven expertise and high security: Alibaba Cloud has a track record of supporting large gaming companies with its mature solutions and extensive experience in handling high concurrent workloads, traffic spikes, and security threats.

• Cost efficiency: Competitive pricing models outperform alternatives with comparable performance.

• Multi-cloud alignment: Alibaba Cloud's cutting-edge technology stack, including the cloud-native architecture, global infrastructure, network acceleration, and robust reliability, perfectly aligns with CTW's multi-cloud strategy.

• Proximity to CTW partners: Alibaba Cloud's strong presence throughout Asia enhances CTW's collaboration with Chinese game developers.

Powered by Alibaba Cloud's offerings, the G123 platform attained exceptional robustness and flexibility in the following key aspects:

• Latency: Alibaba Cloud's global backbone network and IDCs effectively reduced latency for players both in Japan and worldwide, ensuring seamless gameplay.

• Database and storage: Alibaba Cloud's distributed caching and cloud-native database services enabled high read and write speeds for game data, enabling real-time interactions for millions of concurrent players.

• Operational resilience: The enhanced platform architecture maintains high availability and low latency during both daily operations and high-traffic events, ensuring system stability and enhancing user retention.

Alibaba Cloud's ACK has automated new game launches and enhanced elastic resource scheduling for the platform. At the same time, out-of-the-box solutions like the Microservices Engine (MSE) gateway resolved critical challenges during cloud-native transitions, including application state management and detection of newly launched servers, ensuring streamlined operations.

The G123 platform has showcased exceptional performance in stability, load capacity, and cost efficiency.

• Stability: Ensures 100% uptime during traffic surges and even during the launches of blockbuster games.

• Load balancing: Easily handles millions of users from across the globe by utilizing an expansive, worldwide backbone of servers, while ensuring rapid backend response times and seamless interactions

• Cost efficiency: Effectively allocates resources and offers elastic billing models to ensure cost-controlled scaling by using a well-leveraged network of global servers that helps focus resources on targeted users and markets.

CTW plans to deepen its collaboration with Alibaba Cloud to unlock a wider array of cloud gaming possibilities, such as enabling "click-to-play" instant access with cloud streaming. The company also aims to advance smart data operations, expand global user reach, and innovate gaming experiences through cloud computing technologies.