Database Use Case | Redis Enterprise, the Best Deployment Choice for Gaming Companies!
Recently, the gaming market research company Newzoo released its 2023 Global Games Market Report: the global games market generated a total revenue of $184 billion in 2023 (approximately 1.31 trillion RMB), representing a year-over-year growth of 0.6%. Furthermore, the gaming market is expected to maintain an average annual growth rate of 1.3%, reaching $205.7 billion by 2026.
User experience is absolutely the core of the gaming industry! If gaming companies wish to gain a competitive edge in the digital world, they must create unique and dynamic control experiences to attract and retain customers. To support highly personalized interactions, content caching, user session management, scoring, ranking, leaderboards, social engagement, messaging, notifications, real-time analytics, and high-speed transactions, Redis is the preferred database to help gaming companies achieve their goals.
Whether improving player engagement or optimizing backend performance, Redis Enterprise empowers gaming companies to deliver exceptional experiences. With its efficiency and versatility in enabling real-time engagement at scale, Redis simplifies the process of deploying and scaling across cloud environments closest to players—meeting critical gaming demands while ensuring outstanding gameplay.
Today, we’ll explore nine gaming use cases powered by Redis Enterprise and discover how it drives global game launches!
Use Case · Player Engagement
Leaderboards & Rankings
Massively scalable multiplayer games face challenges in distributed computing and instant visibility—who’s leading, by how much, and for how long. Leaderboards are often used to gamify platforms, enhancing user experience. Redis’ Sorted Sets are perfectly suited for leaderboard implementation, making Redis a popular choice for many gaming applications.
Figure 1: Tracking user progress via rankings, scores, and leaderboards
Jelly Button Games Ltd, a subsidiary of Playtika, designs and develops free-to-play multiplayer games. They use Redis Enterprise for caching, session storage, real-time leaderboard tracking, messaging, and more. Redis Enterprise helps Jelly Button Games reduce costs, minimize downtime, and improve performance, stability, and time-to-market.
Personalization
Gaming apps can leverage Redis Enterprise to collect and process vast amounts of in-game data, segment gameplay variations, and quickly identify optimal configurations. Rapid user acquisition and sustained retention require delivering the right content in milliseconds. Redis Enterprise’s ultra-fast throughput, low latency, and built-in analytics enable rich experiences that drive conversions, engagement, and user acquisition.
Figure 2: Fast data ingestion, content delivery, and instant analytics for personalization
Community & Matchmaking
Whether forming teams or battling opponents in a battle royale, effective matchmaking pairs compatible players in real time—a key element in building gaming communities. Players don’t want to wait. Redis Enterprise processes millions of matchmaking requests simultaneously with sub-millisecond latency, enabling smart algorithms that factor in location, player ratings, and more. The result? Seamless matches against equally skilled opponents.
Figure 3: Using search, queries, and Redis servers to manage matchmaking queues and return results in real time.
Inventory Management
Game inventories—including in-game currency, stores, and character catalogs—must always be available to players. Redis Enterprise combines in-memory architecture with scalability and persistence, allowing gaming companies to respond in real time and display any inventory catalog instantly. This translates to better player experiences and increased monetization.
Figure 4: Using search, queries, and Redis Streams to serve inventory from document storage in real time.
Use Case · Backend Performance Optimization
Caching
Redis caching is a critical technique for game developers—delivering graphics, images, thumbnails, music, metadata, and tags at lightning speed. It’s the most cost-effective way to achieve ultra-responsive mobile and gaming experiences.
Redis is ideal for caching not only because of its speed but also due to features like diverse data structures, customizable expiration, eviction policies, smart caching, pipelining, persistence, and high availability. Redis Enterprise’s high-availability caching ensures uninterrupted user experiences even during outages.
Figure 5: Using caching to deliver graphics, images, thumbnails, and metadata at lightning speed.
High-Speed Transactions
Games rely on Redis’ low-latency capabilities to handle high-performance, large-scale data processing—especially when data arrives in massive volumes at high speeds.
Game operations, account authentication, media purchases, content downloads, and other transactions require Redis’ impressive performance with tunable consistency and durability. Redis Enterprise enables multi-operation command execution with adjustable consistency and persistence, facilitating high-speed transactions. Applications like bid management benefit from built-in analytics (e.g., highest bid or bid range) using Redis Sorted Sets.
Figure 6: Achieving consistency and durability in high-speed transactions
Etermax, the studio behind Trivia Crack and Pictionary Online, faced limitations with its open-source Redis setup. To overcome CPU bottlenecks, scalability issues, and high costs, they migrated to Redis Enterprise.
Session Storage
Redis Enterprise is the ideal database for caching and session storage, offering high availability and persistence with in-memory replication. It serves both purposes in a single setup, as shown below.
Figure 7: Designing caching and session storage with Redis Enterprise
Real-Time Analytics
Real-time analytics give gaming companies a unified view of in-game events—from player segmentation to targeted promotions and status reporting. With countless concurrent events, Redis Enterprise’s responsiveness powers real-time dashboards that maintain high performance while delivering actionable insights.
Figure 8: Combining Redis Streams with multiple modules for real-time customization and game understanding.
Cheat Detection
Identifying bad actors who disrupt communities is more critical than ever—while avoiding false positives that penalize legitimate players. Speed and accuracy are equally vital. Redis Enterprise’s sub-millisecond latency processes millions of events simultaneously, enabling precise cheat detection in real time.
Figure 9: Redis Streams and Sorted Sets combined with search and query modules for real-time cheat analysis.
Redis Enterprise: The Best Deployment Choice for Gaming Companies
For gaming companies, downtime directly impacts revenue and customer experience, making true high availability a critical database requirement. Beyond availability, databases must seamlessly scale to handle traffic spikes. Redis Enterprise enhances Redis deployments with:
Zero-downtime scaling and clustering
World-class high availability, including persistence, cross-rack/zone/region replication, instant failover, backups, and disaster recovery
Performance is another key factor. Games must remain responsive even during peak traffic—ideally at the lowest cost. Benchmarked at 1.5 million operations per second with 1ms latency on a standard AWS EC2 instance, Redis Enterprise delivers consistent high performance, linear scaling, and minimized operational costs.
Born in the cloud-native era, Redis uniquely enables multi-cloud, hybrid, and global data unification to maximize business potential.
Redis Enterprise can be deployed as:
A fully managed service on cloud/PaaS (Redis Enterprise Cloud)
Downloadable software in your data center, VPC, or hybrid environments
Cost-efficient flash storage (70% lower cost than RAM) for high-throughput, low-latency large-scale datasets
Redis Enterprise eliminates operational burdens related to scaling, high availability, and Redis management while maintaining full compatibility with open-source Redis.
Figure 10: Only Redis Enterprise offers Active-Active geo-distribution based on Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs).
Data: The Lifeline of Every Business
Redis helps organizations reimagine how quickly they can process, analyze, predict, and act on data. By offering open-source and enterprise-grade data platforms, Redis powers real-time, experience-driven applications at any scale—delivering a competitive edge.
Redis Enterprise Software is a self-managed data platform for deploying real-time applications with full data control. Compared to high-cost alternatives, it offers unmatched affordability, speed, compliance, reliability, and resilience—unlocking Redis’ full potential for enterprises.