For League of Legends Creator Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business

Nerval's Lobster writes "Riot Games created the very successful League of Legends gaming franchise, which hosts millions of monthly users. Barry Livingston, director of engineering for the company's Big Data group, talks about how Riot Games scaled up to deal with that enormous data load. Consider all the millions of people playing the game in real time. Picture joining three massive tables — player data, game data, and session data — and you begin to see the full scope of Riot Games' issue. Gamer activity generates more than 500 GB of structured data and over four TB of operational logs every day. Riot Games has also posted 60 open-source Chef and Opscode recipes, among other code samples."

Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise"

[LordLucless]

Just as much as every FPS ever is just a rip-off of Wolfenstein

Re:Massive bandwidth used for streaming

[blackraven14250]

Well, they already have a spectator mode built in to their client, with the ability to watch any PvP game being played on their servers on a 3 minute delay (to prevent using it to cheat). There's all of the other technical issues like the ones that I mention that would be required to allow the other functions of a championship game to be broadcasted, but a spectator mode does already exist. Hell, I use LOLReplay, which automatically connects to the spectator view for any and all games I play and saves the replay for later viewing. You can probably use that file size to estimate a cap for bandwidth savings. The largest replay I have is 22MB for a game that lasted an hour and 20 minutes. To stream that in 1080, you're probably looking at over 2GB of bandwidth, so your maximum savings is almost 2GB per viewer. With 10 million viewers (and there were more than that watching the championships on Twitch alone, which was just one of the US streaming providers; I remember seeing 14 and 15 million nearly the whole time), that's an enormous 20 petabytes. Obviously, once you have shoutcast voices and the other streaming bits, you're going to cut into that, but it's going to be a huge savings that could be pocketed rather than given up to the streaming provider (since they're running the ads and taking their cut to pay for that bandwidth before paying Riot their share).

Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise"

[Slotty]

More accurately: isn't it just one rip-off? It's just DotA.

Seeing as League of Legends was created by the guy that created DotA he didn't rip it off he just decided to take his own work and develop it into a successful business instead of relying on the ever trustworthy Blizzard who has the best intentions for all their community based developers