Think the World Series is big? Or the Super Bowl? Neither comes close to the billions of people that tune in to watch the World Cup, soccer's (football to everyone else outside North America) quadrennial event.
But what about the most played game in your household? That’s likely Electronic Arts’ EA Sports FIFA, the world's best-selling sports video game franchise. EA Sports FIFA offers otherwise average athletes the chance to take on and beat the world’s best, weaving intricate passing plays and mastering Messi-esque dribbling with the flick of a controller.
All without leaving the comfort of their couch.
Not everyone chooses to play FIFA on their XBox or Playstation, however. Throughout Asia one of the most popular ways to bend it like Beckham is with EA’s FIFA Online 3. The massively multiplayer online soccer game is the most popular sports game in Korea, allowing players to choose to play and customize a team from any of over 30 leagues and 15,000 real world players.
Players like Ronaldo. Like Özil. Like Ibrahimovic. Or Park Ji-sung. (More on him later.)
Because EA FIFA Online 3, developed by Spearhead, one of EA’s leading development studios, needs to scale to millions of players, Spearhead built the game to run on MongoDB, the industry's most scalable database. EA already runs 250 MongoDB servers, spread across 80 shards. As EA FIFA Online 3 continues to grow in popularity, EA expects MongoDB's autosharding and other features to make it simple to scale.
Not content to win accolades on the field, EA FIFA Online 3 has also garnered honors from the industry, most recently winning a MongoDB Innovation Award, due to its creative use of MongoDB.
Even better, EA's Spearhead, recipient of the $2,500 award for its work, donated it to the Park Ji-sung JS Foundation. Park, who played for years for Manchester United and tormented Arsenal defenses, “congratulate[d] Spearhead on the great performance of FIFA Online 3,” performance enabled by its underlying MongoDB data infrastructure.
In addition to EA, Kixeye and a variety of other gaming companies use MongoDB to improve the gaming experience.