Poki is a leading web games platform that offers free online gaming to more than 30
million users monthly from around the globe. In doing so, Poki also helps game
developers bring their games to the market and monetize them through online
advertising. The platform optimizes game discovery by giving gamers personalized
recommendations based on the games they already like.
Poki strives to ensure that all
the games on its platform are instantly playable across the web. Download performance
is a critical factor in keeping users coming back for more. Casper van Wezel, Head of
Technology for Poki, says, “We've found that loading times are directly correlated to
the number of successful game plays. Fast-loading games lead to more game plays, which
lead to happier users and better financial results.”
The Challenge
Bringing games as
close as possible to users is a critical part of Poki’s strategy. With 1.1 million
hours of play per day and users playing in numerous native languages including German,
Chinese and Turkish, Poki needs to satisfy a globally-distributed, high-traffic
audience. Offloading the workload from its origin servers is essential, as is
optimizing the transfer of
and dynamic game data.
However, with its previous CDN
provider, Poki was experiencing unresolved issues in edge communications with users.
Determined to give both users and developers the best performance possible, Poki
reviewed a panoply of CDN players to find the solution it needed.
The Cloudflare
solution
Poki began leveraging Cloudflare's CDN service for its image and game files.
It then also moved its on-the-fly image resizing and HTML serving completely to
Cloudflare. With Cloudflare Image Resizing, Poki serves resized
that are
optimized for each visitor's device, keeping
as lean as possible without
compromising the user experience.
Dynamic game content that cannot be cached is served
by Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing. Casper van Wezel says, “Our data shows that
Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing product outperforms competitors.” The global Cloudflare
network enables Argo to detect real-time congestion and route web traffic across the
fastest and most reliable network paths, helping Poki optimize performance for users
everywhere.
Win-win for Poki and its gamers
Poki now sees significant download speed
improvements thanks to the reliable, high-performance Cloudflare infrastructure and
functionality. As Casper van Wezel says, “Along with improving our existing US
infrastructure, our users in South America are experiencing huge speed increases,
because they are now served not with the cheapest edge location, but the fastest.”
Poki
thus optimizes its website performance, which is vitally important for our user
experience and for keeping users engaged and active.
