Building real-time data products to power their online casino’s core operations and user experiences.
| 60% | 30 minutes | 1M+ |
|---|---|---|
| Smaller team sizes to produce the same outcome | Time to create and update new real-time data products | Player transactions/day handled |
Overview: Real-Time Player Personalization at Scale
Miracle Studio is a fast-growing company focused on building and operating a social casino product online. Founded by two partners, including CTO Or Hirschhorn, the company has scaled to a 10-person team and handles millions of daily player transactions. Unlike typical white-label platforms, Miracle Studio owns and operates its casino product end-to-end. To ensure profitability in this high-volume, data-intensive environment, they rely on real-time data infrastructure to drive user personalization, retention, and business performance.
Challenges Faced: Profitability Depends on Real-Time Aggregations
Social casinos generate vast amounts of data—up to a million spins per day and growing. The business requires continuous aggregation of this data to:
- Monitor user activity and calculate key performance indicators like gross and net gaming revenue (GGR/NGR).
- Personalize player experiences in real time based on “hype” scores.
- Monitor regulatory compliance per jurisdiction, including lifetime spending caps.
- Adjust marketing spend based on traffic source performance.
The Miracle Studio’s team needed a way to create trustworthy, composable, and real-time data products that could power their core operations.
Choosing Materialize: Real-Time Aggregation Without ETL Overhead
Materialize stood out for its plug-and-play simplicity and full SQL support. With a managed Postgres instance (Aurora) streaming directly into Materialize, Or was able to:
- Power real-time views across millions of player transactions.
- Deliver personalized experiences through a customer data platform (CDP) integration.
- Replace complex ETL pipelines with SQL-defined views that are always fresh.
Real-Time Segmentation, Personalization, and Compliance.
Materialize enables Miracle Studios to start with a single feed from Postgres, and create live data products that power multiple critical business functions:
- Real-Time Offers: Players receive dynamic offers based on their real-time happiness score. For example, a user who lost money and a tournament may receive a larger bonus than someone currently on a winning streak.
- Responsive, data-intensive UIs: Materialize powers dynamic UI components such as loyalty tier tracking, which would be too expensive to run on Postgres.
- Regulatory Compliance: Player-level spending is monitored continuously. Materialize ensures purchases don’t violate legal limits across daily, weekly, and lifetime windows with millisecond-latency checks.
- Agile Business Logic: Using dbt, Or can deploy new real-time views and aggregations within 30 minutes and without downtime, ensuring business continuity even under strict regulatory constraints.
- Marketing ROI Optimization: Revenue attribution by traffic source is aggregated in Materialize and analyzed with Metabase, their BI tool, to inform monthly ad budget decisions.
Architectural Simplicity: Lean Team, Scalable Stack
Despite operating a data-intensive product, Miracle Studio’s technical team consists of just two developers. Or estimates that Materialize allows him to operate the same experience with 60% fewer engineers, vs trying to recreate a similar stack using Snowflake. With a data warehouse, they also would not get anywhere near the same data freshness as they do with Materialize (mere seconds between updates happening in the casino and when their aggregations reflect those changes, vs minutes or hours using other approaches).
Looking Ahead: AI and Feature Expansion
While not yet implemented, Miracle Studio plans to use AI to identify high-performing games and recommend them to players. The current architecture supports rapid experimentation, letting the team stay lean and focused on user experience.
Conclusion: Materialize Drives Profitability in the Face of Uncertainty
For Miracle Studio, profitability depends on reacting to player behavior in the moment, complying with local laws, and creating a dynamic, engaging UI that keeps players coming back. Materialize enables them to do this while also future proofing their core architecture for an anticipated 10x increase in traffic. By offloading complex reads from Postgres and maintaining always-fresh views-as-data-products, Materialize functions as a central engine for their business logic that gives them the scale and agility to navigate a hyper-competitive market.