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Inside the data systems of gaming’s global hits: The tech stack behind billions in revenue

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As user acquisition costs continue to climb and the complexity of global game operations intensifies, many studios are discovering the limitations of their traditional analytics tools. The modern challenge is no longer just about accessing data; it is about turning insight into action rapidly, across every department, and in every market.

From Whiteout Survival and Archero to Wuthering Waves, some of the world’s most successful games are being built on a new kind of foundation: a unified infrastructure for analytics and live ops, tailored specifically to the unique demands of game development. At the centre of this operational shift is ThinkingData’s ThinkingEngine (TE), a platform empowering teams to move faster, scale smarter, and build a foundation for long-term success.

Century Games: Breaking Down Silos with Unified Data

When Whiteout Survival exploded onto the global stage, earning over $2 billion, Century Games faced a new operational challenge born from its own success: how do you keep your live ops, marketing, product, and design teams aligned when players, markets, and content are all scaling at an exponential rate?

Inside the data systems of gaming’s global hits: The tech stack behind billions in revenue

Most analytics tools silo data into dashboards accessible only to analysts. This creates bottlenecks, forcing other teams to wait on reports or make decisions based on intuition rather than real-time player behaviour. ThinkingEngine was designed to change that.


By unifying analytics and live ops into a single platform, TE gave Century the ability to turn behavioural data into immediate action across every team. The results speak for themselves: over 60% of Century employees now actively use ThinkingEngine, from product managers and designers to operations and user acquisition specialists. Product teams can monitor onboarding friction points and test fixes with zero-code updates. Live ops teams track event performance in real time, adjusting drop rates or rewards on the fly.


Crucially, this unified approach means everyone is working from the same behavioural truth. When your user acquisition team speaks the same data language as your live ops team, scaling globally stops being reactive and becomes truly strategic.

Habby: A Self-Hosted Foundation for Creative Freedom

Few studios have demonstrated more consistency in recent years than Habby. With a string of hits including Archero, Survivor.io, and Capybara Go, they have proven that innovation and data discipline can coexist. Their unique approach to infrastructure has been key to this success.

Rather than relying on third-party SaaS tools or building a costly internal system from scratch, Habby partnered with ThinkingData to deploy a fully self-hosted version of ThinkingEngine. This provided total control over their player data – with no third-party collection or external hosting – while avoiding the immense cost and complexity of building in-house data infrastructure.

More importantly, it created an environment where experimentation could thrive. The self-hosted platform enables Habby to run rapid experiments across titles, test variations in game mechanics or content pacing, and double down on the formulas that work. Insights from one game can be directly applied to future titles using a unified data architecture. Every successful release compounds the value of the infrastructure beneath it; the more data they generate, the more powerful their system becomes. By maintaining full data ownership, Habby has created a foundation that gets stronger with every win.


Kuro Games: Post-Launch Recovery at a Global Scale

Kuro Games’ Wuthering Waves launched in May 2024 with huge momentum, earning $42 million in its first week. However, the team soon faced a serious challenge with declining user numbers and revenue. To recover, they needed to move surgically, diagnosing issues across multiple regions and platforms to retain players, not alienate them.

ThinkingEngine’s game-specific features provided the necessary clarity. The team used detailed heatmaps to visualise player behaviour, identifying underused zones and exploration drop-offs that allowed them to rebalance content pacing. They segmented users by region and platform to fine-tune both gameplay and user acquisition strategies, aligning campaign spend with retention data from key markets like Japan, Korea, and the US.


This allowed them to iterate intelligently. Updates began driving major spikes in engagement and revenue – up to 290% increases on patch days. By June 2025, Wuthering Waves had its second-best revenue month since launch, reaching over $250 million on mobile. What began as a post-launch scramble turned into a blueprint for sustainable growth, fuelled by real-time insight.

Infrastructure Built for the Realities of Game Development


The stories behind Century, Habby, and Kuro are about more than just numbers; they are about infrastructure. They demonstrate the power of giving studios the tools to eliminate data silos, accelerate iteration, and unify teams around a shared behavioural truth.

ThinkingData’s ThinkingEngine now powers over 8,000 games across more than 1,500 studios. Whether through self-hosted deployments, configurable live ops loops, or analytics tailored for real player behaviour, it turns data into a competitive advantage, not a bottleneck.

Curious to see how ThinkingData can help your games grow? Contact us to schedule a product demo.

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