Nexon picks Couchbase to build, drop games faster

Nexon, a developer of multiplayer online role-playing games (or MMORPGs), selected Couchbase’s Capella – a NoSQL database as a service (DBaaS) – for greater developer agility.

With Capella, the Japan-based, South Korean-founded firm achieved a faster time to market with its launch of Blue Archive, a free-to-play mobile gacha game first released in Korea in November 2021.

Using Capella, Nexon dramatically improved data management and replication across geographies. This allowed the company to get new markets up and running within 20 minutes as they rolled out across Asia, Europe, and North America. 

Additionally, Nexon’s developers experienced faster query speed, as well as improved uptime and operational efficiency. Couchbase Capella’s high availability and distributed memory-first architecture resulted in a consistent performance experience for players as game adoption grew.

“This will be our biggest year for new game launches in Nexon’s history,” said Jae Beom Cho, director of Game Infrastructure at Nexon. 

“One of our top priorities is delivering amazing gaming experiences to users,” said Cho. “Harnessing the power of the cloud through Capella allowed us to deploy applications in multiple regions in parallel quickly and seamlessly.” 

The mobile gaming market, expected to surpass US$153 billion by 2027, has been experiencing unprecedented popularity and growth. In line with this trend, Nexon’s newly launched game, Blue Archive, has earned a game sales ranking of fourth on Google Play and eighth on the Apple App Store.

“Easy to develop, manage, and scale, our DBaaS has the flexibility to support a variety of use cases, with gaming being a key industry,” said Stuart Fisher, Couchbase regional VP of Asia Pacific. “We look forward to continuing our work with Nexon to deliver premium story and gameplay experiences for users.”