www.popcap.com

solutions:

• Akamai Electronic Software Delivery

• Improved download performance by 250% in Europe
• Increased conversion rate by average of 15% globally
• Seamlessly handles 85% increase in site traffic
• Offloads origin server by 75%

PopCap Games Inc., a leader in the $1.5 billion dollar online casual gaming industry, offers both online and downloadable games and has undergone rapid growth since its founding in 2000. Its site has served over 12 billion hours of gameplay since 2001, and its wildly successful and award-winning Bejeweled® game has been downloaded more than 150 million times. All told, more than 350,000,000 copies of PopCap's games have been downloaded from the PopCap site alone. The games are also offered on partner sites including MSN® Games, Yahoo!®, RealOne™ Arcade, and Shockwave.com™. In 2006, consumers spent $75 million on PopCap's games, and that figure is projected to grow to approximately $120 million in 2007.

As part of its aggressive plans for growth, PopCap is marketing its games in Europe and Asia. Knowing that its centralized origin site was a potential single point of failure – and that it would either have to expand it's co-location footprint or scale its existing infrastructure dramatically to support certain key initiatives—the company considered a number of options to address its globalization efforts. "Akamai allows us to confidently deliver our games around the world while alleviating the need to expand into international co-location space. Because of Akamai, we can grow cost-effectively and repurpose our servers for other initiatives. On top of that, Akamai enables us to increase our redundancy and global reach on a level that we could never achieve on our own," explains Reifenrath.