Scaling Your Social Games to Handle Popularity

Dr Robert Zubek of Zynga gave a fascinating talk, “Engineering Scalable Social Games,” at GDC 2010 Game Developers Conference about how Zynga has scaled up their computing resources to handle an increase number of players as well as increased usage. While the talk was fairly technical, here is the gist.

The primary problem: Social games by their very nature will attract increasingingly more players, and your servers have to be able to cope. A few reasons for growth:

  • Users will brag about their accomplishments, say on their Facebook Wall.
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