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Windows Azure

Customer Solution Case Study

343 Industries Gets New User Insights from

Big Data in the Cloud

Overview Country or Region: United States

Industry: Professional services – IT

services

Customer Profile

The 343 Industries development team

hosts and manages Halo 4, an award-

winning game for the Microsoft Xbox 360

video game and entertainment console.

Business Situation

The team needed to provide business

intelligence (BI) insight about the game

to internal and external customers.

Solution

The team implemented a solution that

uses Windows Azure HDInsight Service,

based on the Apache Hadoop data-

processing framework, and Microsoft BI

technologies.

Benefits

 Enhances user experience through

increased agility and faster response

times.

 Connects Halo 4 team directly to

customers through weekly updates.

 Keeps playing field level by providing

in-game analysis to detect cheaters.

 Facilitates customized campaigns

aimed at retaining players.



“With Hadoop on Windows Azure, we can mine data

and understand our audience in a way we never could

before. It’s really the BI solution for the future.”

Mark Vayman, Lead Program Manager, Halo Services Team

The Halo franchise is an award-winning collection of properties

that has grown into a global entertainment phenomenon. To

date, more than 50 million copies of Halo video games have

been sold worldwide. As developers prepared to launch Halo 4,

they were tasked with analyzing data to gain insights into player

preferences and support an online tournament. To handle those

requests, the team used a powerful Microsoft technology called

Windows Azure HDInsight Service, based on the Apache

Hadoop big data framework. Using HDInsight Service to process

and analyze raw data from Windows Azure, the team was able to

feed game statistics to the tournament’s operator, which used

the data to rank players based on game play. The team also

used HDInsight Service to update Halo 4 every week and

support a daily email campaign designed to increase player

retention. Organizations can also take advantage of data to

quickly make business decisions.

Situation Halo 4 marks the beginning of a new saga

in the blockbuster franchise that has

shaped entertainment history and defined a

generation of gamers. Developed by

Microsoft Studios’ 343 Industries

exclusively for the Microsoft Xbox 360

video game and entertainment system,

Halo 4 brings back the Master Chief

character in a new, epic sci-fi adventure.

Released in November 2012, the game

achieved more than $220 million in global

sales in its first 24 hours and attracted more

than 4 million players in its first five days

after launch.

For the Halo Services Team, a development

team at 343 Industries that manages the

game, one of the biggest challenges is

scaling to meet player demands. That’s one

reason the team uses the Windows Azure

cloud development platform to power the

game’s back-end supporting services.

These services run the game’s key

multiplayer features, including

leaderboards and avatar rendering. Hosting

the multiplayer parts of the game in

Windows Azure ensures that the team has a

way to quickly and inexpensively add and

remove server capacity as needed.

As the game was prepared for release,

however, 343 Industries was faced with an

entirely new kind of challenge: to gain

insight into player behavior and user

preferences. To achieve this goal, Microsoft

leadership asked 343 Industries to find a

way to effectively mine user data.

At the same time, the team was faced with

another need: analyzing data during the

five-week Halo 4 “Infinity Challenge”

tournament and providing results each day

to their tournament partner, Virgin Gaming.

The Halo 4 Infinity Challenge, the largest

free-to-enter online Halo tournament in the

world, tracked a player’s personal score in

the game’s multiplayer modes across a

global leaderboard, giving players a chance

to win more than 2,800 prizes. Virgin

Gaming needed to use business

intelligence (BI) data gathered during the

event to update leaderboards on the

tournament website.

To meet these business requirements, the

343 Industries knew it needed to find a BI

technology solution that would integrate

with Windows Azure. “One of the great

things about 343 Industries is how they use

cutting-edge technology like Azure,” says

Alex Gregorio, Program Manager for

Microsoft Studios, which published Halo 4.

“So we wanted to find the best BI

environment out there, and we needed to

make sure it integrated with Azure.”

Because all Halo 4 game data is housed in

Azure, the team wanted to find a solution

that could effectively produce usable BI

information from that data. The team also

needed to process this data in the same

data center, minimizing storage costs and

avoiding charges for data transfers across

two data centers. Additionally, the team

wanted full control over job priorities, so

that the performance and delivery of

analytical queries would not be affected by

other processing jobs run at the same time.

“We had to have a flexible solution that was

not on-premises,” states Gregorio.

The team began its search for a new BI

solution in the months leading up to the

scheduled November launch of Halo 4.

Solution Although it initially considered building its

own custom BI solution, 343 Industries

ultimately decided to use HDInsight

Service, which is based on Apache Hadoop,

an open-source software framework

created by Yahoo! Hadoop, which is ideal

for running complex analytics, can analyze

massive amounts of unstructured data in a

distributed manner. HDInsight Service is a

big data solution for Windows Azure that

empowers users to gain new insights from

unstructured data, while connecting that

data to familiar Microsoft BI tools. “Even

though we knew we would be one of the

earliest customers of HDInsight Service, it

met all our requirements,” says Tamir

Melamed, Development Manager on the

Halo Services Team. “It can run any possible

queries, and it is the best format for

integration with Azure.”

The team was particularly attracted to the

flexibility of HDInsight Service, which

allowed for separating the amount of the

raw data from the processing size needed

to consume that data. “With previous

systems, we never had the separation

between production and raw data, so there

was always the question of how running

analytics would affect production,” says

Mark Vayman, Lead Program Manager for

the Halo Services Team. “Hadoop solved

that problem.”

HDInsight Service was also instrumental in

changing the team’s focus from data

storage to useful data analysis. That’s

because Hadoop applies structure to data

when it’s consumed, as opposed to

traditional data warehouse applications

that structure data before it is placed into a

BI system.

The team wrote Azure-based services that

convert raw game data collected in Azure

into the Avro format, which is supported by

Hadoop. This data is then pushed from the

Azure services in the Avro format into

Windows Azure binary large object (BLOB)

storage, which HDInsight Service is able to

utilize with the ASV protocol. The data can

then be accessed by anyone with the right

permissions from Windows Azure.

Every day, Hadoop handles millions of

data-rich objects related to Halo 4,

including preferred game modes, game

length, and many other items. With

Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for

SharePoint as a front-end presentation

layer, Azure BLOBs are created based on

queries from the Halo 4 team.

Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel

loads data from HDInsight Service using

the Hadoop Hive ODBC driver. A

PowerPivot workbook is then uploaded to

PowerPivot for SharePoint and refreshed

nightly within SharePoint, using the

connection string stored in the workbook

via the Hive ODBC driver to HDInsight

Service. The team uses the workbooks to

generate reports and facilitate their viewing

of interactive data dashboards.

Benefits Using HDInsight Service, 343 Industries is

more agile and can respond faster to

customer requests. With the solution’s

flexibility, the Halo Services Team is able to

make weekly updates to the game and was

able to help Virgin Gaming detect cheaters

in the online Infinity Challenge tournament.

HDInsight Service also supports customized

email campaigns that the Halo marketing

team is using to improve the user

experience and retain players. In addition,

the solution relies on familiar tools that can

be used to simplify decision making.

Increases Agility and Speeds Response

Time

With HDInsight Service, 343 Industries is

more agile and can respond more quickly

to business requests for BI. Part of the

reason for this agility is the solution’s

performance. With Hadoop, the team was

able to build a configuration system that

can be used to turn various Azure data

feeds on or off as needed. “That really

helps us get optimal performance, and it’s a

big advantage because we can use the

same Azure data source to run compute for

HDInsight Service on multiple clusters,”

says Vayman. “It made it easy for us to

drive business requests for analysis through

an ad-hoc Hadoop cluster without affecting

the jobs being run.”

And launching Hadoop clusters is a simple,

fast process. “We can easily launch a new

Hadoop cluster in minutes, run a query, and

get back to the business in a few hours or

less,” says Melamed. “Azure is very agile by

nature, and Hadoop on Azure is more

powerful as a result.”

Helps Halo 4 Team Make Weekly Game

Updates

In addition to responding quickly to

business requests, the Halo 4 team can take

BI data pulled from the game each day and

identify user trends, such as the average

length of a game and the specific game

features that players use the most. By

getting these insights, the Halo 4 team can

make frequent updates to the game.

“Based on the user preference data we’re

getting from Hadoop, we’re able to update

game maps and game modes on a week-

to-week basis,” says Vayman. “And the

suggestions we get in the forums often find

their way into the next week’s update. We

can actually use this feedback to make

changes and see if we attract new players.

Hadoop and the forums are great tuning

mechanisms for us.”

The team is also taking user feedback and

giving it to the game’s designers, who can

consider the suggestions in developing

future editions of Halo.

Provides In-Game Analysis and Helps

Identify Cheaters

Because Hadoop applies structure to data

when it’s consumed, the team can focus