Golden Manager is a football game for the web with an ambitious monetization strategy. Backed by F.C. Barcelona player Gerard Piqué, it started out as an MVP developed by a third-party agency to get it off the ground quickly.

Although useful at the beginning, the MVP showed quite a few problems very soon. On one hand development had slowed down to a crawl due to poor code quality, but the biggest problem was its architecture and design, which made it unable to scale to the demands of a hungry fandom. Every time Piqué tweeted about the game, thousands of fans came running to sign up, crashing the entire system. On top of that, their monetized features were too slow to be engaging to users, who often walked away in frustration.
That's when we came in. Once we stabilized the platform, and without stopping feature development at any time, we overhauled the whole system. We took the self-hosted monolithic Rails application, deployed with much fear once a week, to a rock-solid, multi-region AWS deployment that handled 8 million registered accounts, with thousands of concurrent users at any given time.

Company type
Gaming
Solution
Data engineering
Software Architecture & Development
Outcome
When we handed over the project, we had put a team of 10 in place, trained in our best practices, shipping code daily on a solid production system handling both the steady influx of new paying customers and thousands of concurrent users playing the game.

Location
Barcelona, Spain

Technologies
Ruby on Rails
Ember.js
AWS
DynamoDB
Redshift