It is generally agreed that Hadoop is an extremely complex system to master and requires intensive developer skills. There is also a lack of an effective ecosystem and standards around the open-source offering.

King.com uses the technology to analyse 'events', which is any action taken within a game by a player. This could be the starting of a game, any transaction made, attempts tried at each level, sharing habits, all of which are written into a line in the text file and stored on the web server log file. The log files from every server are then moved into HDFS and the Hadoop environment for analysis.

"We needed something that could scale because we saw an almost exponential increase in the number of events we recorded from our games, which was driven by us increasing the number of games we offer, but also by increasing the variety of events we recorded," said Eriksson.

"Everybody wants a business case for Hadoop, but for me it is simply about difference between knowing what happens in a game and not knowing For example, one thing we can analyse that requires a substantial amount of data is game optimisation," he added.

"Let's say that we have 150 levels that the user will complete one by one. If for whatever reason level 50 is too hard, then people will be stuck at that point and get tired of the game. So, we need to make sure that the difficulty increases very smoothly across the user progression. It's about fine tuning the game."