Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse is giving Starbreeze the power to make secure, data-driven decisions.

Snowflake has announced that Starbreeze, the independent creator, publisher, and distributor of high-quality entertainment products such as PAYDAY 2 and OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead, uses Snowflake to run a data-driven business.

Implementing Snowflake has resulted in pipeline development cost savings and time savings of eight to 12 months. Additionally, the company now requires only a part-time consultant instead of multiple analysts and engineers. 

Starbreeze’s mobile, PC, and gaming console products cover two core business areas: game development and game publishing.

Prior to finding Snowflake in January 2017, the company struggled to gather, analyse, and securely share data from multiple sources in order to make data-driven business decisions.

Starbreeze found Snowflake through PlayFab, a back-end platform for creating live games.

PlayFab is a Microsoft Azure service with which customers can activate Snowflake, which is what Starbreeze did to query its data. The company is now able to load, process, analyse, and securely share terabytes of data in real time.

“We had never really taken a strong data-driven approach to our business before using Snowflake,” said Irene Hjorth, gaming intelligence analyst at Starbreeze.

“One of our biggest successes was a game called PAYDAY 2 that had a tremendous traction with millions of players worldwide.

“Having an indie mentality, we basically developed it for ourselves without doing much data analysis, and now we are using Snowflake secure data sharing to analyse and share our data in order to understand the behaviour of our players and the reasons for our success.

“We’re now applying this knowledge when creating our future products.”

“Starbreeze was an ideal fit for Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse, given its millions of users and the vast amount of data it was generating 24/7,” Snowflake VP, product, Christian Kleinerman said.

“Starbreeze’s expertise is in creating products that its customers are passionate about. The combination of that with our expertise in all-things-data allows the company to keep its focus on creativity.”

“Based on our data needs, Snowflake just sounded like a match made in heaven since there is no maintenance, no management, unlimited scalability, and ease of deployment,” concluded Hjorth. “It ticked all the boxes for us.”