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The mobile game industry has been growing at an astounding rate over the past decade; beginning with the launch of the iPhone in 2007. The accessibility, reach and ubiquitousness of the mobile platform is further converting a large chunk of the global human population into gamers. This has now been further catalyzed by the COVID-19…

Engineering games involves a deep understanding of multiple technologies, building highly dynamic content, interacting with multiple disciplines and having a constant eye on how the game impacts players in every way.

Introduction Caching is an important aspect of building an application that performs well at web scale. Proper caching can reduce the number of API calls, save on CPU time, make requests faster, the application more responsive, and reduce the infrastructure cost. We used one of the techniques mentioned in this article to reduce the average…

Why & How Words With Friends Is Adopting React Native
By John Bacon, Brian Liang, and Peter Turner on September 18, 2018
App and game developers who work on frequently updated products are often tasked with keeping up…

In 2018, we’ll be celebrating our 9 year anniversary since launching Words With Friends on mobile…

Parikshit Agnihotry and Leo Nishio Migrating primary data stores with no downtime, without losing data can be tricky and a lot could go wrong. One of the games at Zynga, recently completed such a project to migrate our primary data store to Couchbase from Membase, an older version of Couchbase server which is Memcached with…

Andrew Heidgerken Running a live social game can be a lot like playing a game of Jenga; the more moves you make the higher the chance the whole thing may crash down. Earlier this year, noting an increase in user complaints, we realized that the web game I work was threatening to collapse. Years ago,…

(AWS Global Infrastructure)
Purpose
Zynga games have a wide global audience. Our main servers…