Yggdrasil Gaming boosts speed, resilience, and innovation with GOStack and AWS
Global online casino games developer and publisher Yggdrasil Gaming set out to overcome the limitations of its legacy infrastructure and position itself for an AI-driven future…“Time to market is one of the main challenges for online gaming companies,” said Alex Haywood, Managing Directo…
Global online casino games developer and publisher Yggdrasil Gaming set out to overcome the limitations of its legacy infrastructure and position itself for an AI-driven future. It partnered with software engineering provider GOStack and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The result: a high-performance, scalable platform that reduced infrastructure costs by 30%, increased processing capabilities sixfold, and improved uptime to 99.5%.
“Time to market is one of the main challenges for online gaming companies,” said Alex Haywood, Managing Director of Yggdrasil Gaming. “AWS gives us the power to develop quickly, adapt to different market conditions, and scale in new areas. We’ve improved platform performance in nearly every aspect.”
Scaling beyond limits
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Malta, Yggdrasil was cloud-native from the beginning—but as global demand surged, its original architecture could no longer keep up. Frequent disruptions led to degraded player experiences and lost revenue. In 2024, Yggdrasil teamed up with GOStack to completely reimagine its infrastructure using modern, cloud-native technologies on AWS.
“High availability is crucial for our operations—gameplay interruptions are unacceptable,” said Haywood. “By moving to AWS with GOStack’s guidance, we’ve reduced incident rates by 85% and virtually eliminated downtime.”
GOStack: the driving force behind the transformation
GOStack brought deep expertise in cloud and data architecture, DevOps, and scalable infrastructure. Acting as an extension of Yggdrasil’s engineering team, GOStack delivered a robust, cloud-native setup in just eight months, making sure of business continuity throughout the process.
Their contributions included the following:
- Redesigning the architecture using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for container orchestration and horizontal scaling
- Implementing Amazon Aurora for highly available, cost-efficient database management
- Deploying Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) GPU instances to accelerate AI training and data processing
- Optimizing storage and content delivery with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront
- Preparing for the future with Amazon Bedrock to enable generative AI capabilities
Embracing managed services and automation allowed GOStack to help Yggdrasil streamline operations and free engineers to focus on innovation instead of maintenance.
An AI-driven future: no-code game creation for the next generation
Yggdrasil is reimagining game development with a bold vision: eliminate technical barriers and empower creativity through AI and no-code tools. Central to this transformation is Game-in-a-Box, a fully managed no-code platform that enables designers, storytellers, and studios to build and launch games—without writing a single line of code.
“Game-in-a-Box gives creative people the superpowers they need,” said Haywood. “We’re enabling a new generation of game creators who may not come from engineering backgrounds but have extraordinary ideas worth building.”
Game-in-a-Box offers a modular environment where users can visually design mechanics, apply logic templates, upload assets, and configure distribution all through an intuitive interface. Generative AI assists with asset adaptation, localization, and QA, dramatically reducing time-to-market and cost.
Abstracting backend complexity such as compliance, multiplayer scaling, and content delivery means that Game-in-a-Box lets creators focus on storytelling, gameplay, and player engagement. It runs securely and seamlessly on Yggdrasil’s modern AWS-powered infrastructure.
Leaning into the power of data
For Yggdrasil, data is more than just analytics: it’s a creative compass. Although data has long informed its strategy, the shift to AWS allowed Yggdrasil to uncover deeper, real-time insights into player behavior, game performance, and market trends.
The company’s new data infrastructure, built on AWS, features a sophisticated observability layer that captures every facet of player interaction—from session duration and drop-off points to bonus engagement and mechanic effectiveness. These insights now inform everything from game tuning to feature design.
“We make our decisions based on all the available data about how the games are performing,” said Haywood. “Whether it’s identifying which mechanics resonate in a specific market or finding where players tend to drop off, we use these insights to improve our games and we share them with our partner studios so they can do the same.”
Tools such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and Amazon QuickSight allow Yggdrasil to deliver comprehensive, actionable dashboards across its ecosystem.
“With this data foundation in place, we’re not just guessing—we’re optimizing, adapting, and winning faster,” Haywood added.
Ongoing innovation
Modernizing its infrastructure on AWS allowed Yggdrasil to unlock a new level of agility, performance, and scalability—laying the foundation for continuous innovation. As global traffic grows, the company now delivers immersive content faster, with lower latency and near-zero downtime.
“AWS enables us to compete on a global scale,” said Haywood. “We can now deliver content more efficiently and without delays and, more importantly, we can develop and launch new games faster than ever before.”
With a robust, AI-ready architecture in place, Yggdrasil is preparing for the next phase of its evolution where no-code tools, data intelligence, and automation fuel a more open and dynamic era of game development.
“This isn’t just about scaling infrastructure—it’s about scaling imagination,” Haywood concluded.
Learn more about developing games with AWS, or get in touch with an AWS for Games expert.
Further reading
Author: Aleksandra Zgnilec