Managed Services / Augmentation

Snowflake and dbt Platform Modernization for Independent Video Game Studio

The Situation

A Seattle-based independent game studio with two live and in-development titles needed to take over and modernize a Snowflake and Tableau environment that had been inherited from an underperforming vendor. Their data platform supported both a live game and an in-development title simultaneously, meaning instability had direct consequences for gameplay tuning and production decisions. Key challenges included:

  • A legacy Snowflake implementation with no coherent architecture, documentation, alerting, or security best practices
  • Rapidly evolving game telemetry schemas that changed week to week as development progressed
  • A need for flexible managed services support that could scale up or down with development cycles
  • Dashboards built by the prior vendor that tried to show everything at once rather than answering specific analytical questions

What We Did

Reverse-engineered the existing Snowflake environment, identified gaps, and stabilized the platform without a disruptive full rebuild

  • Implemented a Medallion architecture (bronze, silver, gold layers) using dbt Core within Snowflake Workspaces, with JSON event flattening templates tailored to game telemetry data
  • Built automated task failure detection and alerting using Snowflake account logs, persistent logging tables, and scheduled email notification triggers
  • Designed and delivered question-first Tableau dashboards built around specific analytical needs including player funnels, onboarding experience, in-game economy tuning, and progression pacing
  • Maintained a shared data dictionary for game-specific events and metrics to align analytics and development teams on common language
  • Delivered a major schema refactor within a single day when an external playtest created overnight changes to event structures and reporting requirements

Results

  • Stable, secure, and observable Snowflake platform delivered ahead of game launch
  • 25+ dbt models and approximately 18 dashboards and templates built across the engagement
  • Automated alerting in place across all pipeline tasks, eliminating manual monitoring
  • Analytics directly informed gameplay tuning, economy design, and progression decisions ahead of launch

What This Unlocks

For media, gaming, or entertainment companies managing high-velocity event data or inheriting a Snowflake environment from a previous vendor, this engagement demonstrates a stabilize-then-modernize approach that preserves continuity while steadily improving architecture. The JSON telemetry patterns, Medallion modeling conventions, and Snowflake alerting framework are directly reusable for any organization ingesting large volumes of event-based data.

Team

Led by a principal consultant as delivery lead handling Snowflake and dbt architecture, supported by a senior analytics consultant leading dashboard design and requirements, a senior data engineer handling data modeling and event processing, and additional data engineers and analytics consultants scaling execution.

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