Wargaming chooses Mattermost for enterprise collaboration and faster decision-making

Wargaming moves away from Slack and other team messengers toward a modern, enterprise-scale solution built on an open source platform which continually adapts to user needs.

Wargaming: Delivering superior gaming experiences to 180M players

One of the leaders in the free-to-play massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming market, Wargaming is an international game developer and publisher headquartered in Cyprus. The company has more than 20 offices and development centers across the world and has shipped over 15 titles. Wargaming—which has about 4,500 employees and serves 180 million players—is perhaps best known for World of Tanks, a team-based massively multiplayer online action game dedicated to armored warfare of the mid-20th century which was released in 2010.

Wargaming selected Mattermost for ease of use, extensibility, privacy, and faster decision-making.

Challenge

Building interactive gaming experiences for tens of millions of players around the world is no easy feat. Just ask the technologists, designers and managers over at Wargaming, who found themselves facing an all-too-common problem.

The fast-growing company had teams spread out across the world. Each of them were using different chat solutions without IT oversight because their centralized platform, Skype for Business, couldn’t keep pace with user needs. Wargaming needed first class support for Linux and Mac users, reliable delivery across multiple devices and platforms with conversation histories, and modern power user features—like third-party integrations, code snippet, markdown support and dynamic group messaging.

To keep existing games running smoothly while continuing to build new ones, Wargaming’s 68 teams need to easily and securely communicate with each other in real time—especially when they’re on different continents.

But with a multitude of chat platforms in use, employees had to jump from product to product to have conversations. There was no unified workstream collaboration and communication.

This broken experience hurt productivity, frustrated employees and stifled innovation.

Wargaming needed a solution.

Solution

After carefully surveying the market to find the most appropriate solution for their technologists, Wargaming selected a half-dozen platforms to test for large-scale deployment. They quickly found that Mattermost offered superior technology.

While Wargaming’s engineers still used their legacy deployment of Skype for Business for some functions (e.g., video calls and telephony), Mattermost offered modern, centralized messaging under IT control. The platform also met Wargaming’s security and scalability needs while adapting to and integrating with dozens of existing systems and workflows thanks to its open source, developer-friendly nature.

Results

Mattermost was quickly deployed at scale; Wargaming rapidly moved more than 1,500 users to the platform. Productivity and performance quickly increased with 68 teams working on one collaborative communications platform. Soon, teams were communicating and coordinating across 1,400 channels; in just over three months, they had sent over 1 million messages.

Thanks to Mattermost, Wargaming’s employees can “work out loud,” which enables each team to make rapid progress toward shared goals while adapting quickly to changing conditions across geographies and time zones. With everyone on the same system, it’s much easier to reach people and collaborate across teams.

Altogether, the move to modern, centralized communication helps product teams focus on continuously improving gaming experiences for millions of its players—while giving IT the peace of mind that comes with knowing they are compliant with internal and external privacy policies.

“Mattermost has already absorbed the majority of our existing Slack users. The system sold itself without any kind of marketing and additional efforts from our end,” explains Andrei Polazau, Wargaming’s director of Global IT. “Based on our usage statistics, I’m happy with the solution. The main metric is employee satisfaction and that’s definitely improved since we introduced Mattermost.”

According to Polazau, the platform was rapidly adopted. While Mattermost was originally deployed to help engineering, other employees—including marketing teams, business intelligence units and staff from around the world—were drawn to the platform for a few key reasons.

End User Benefits – Collaborative messaging tool that increases productivity and engagement because it is:

Easy-to-use: Offering an intuitive user interface, integration into workflows and instant, user-friendly search.

Offering an intuitive user interface, integration into workflows and instant, user-friendly search. Multi-platform: Supporting Windows, Mac and Linux on desktop and iOS and Android on mobile, as well as many third-party clients through open source adapters.

Supporting Windows, Mac and Linux on desktop and iOS and Android on mobile, as well as many third-party clients through open source adapters. Developer-friendly: Making it easy to share code snippets with syntax highlighting, supporting markdown in messages and offering unmatched extensibility.

Making it easy to share code snippets with syntax highlighting, supporting markdown in messages and offering unmatched extensibility. International: Providing user interfaces in 14 languages.

Providing user interfaces in 14 languages. Slack-compatible: Importing users, channels, theme colors and webhook integrations from Slack is easy; the same keyboard shortcuts are supported.

In addition to fulfilling user needs, there are a host of benefits for IT as well.

IT Benefits – Powerful, easy-to-use infrastructure 100% under IT control that is:

Easy-to-deploy: Initial setup is completed within hours with quick, organic adoption and automatic deployment on new machines.

Initial setup is completed within hours with quick, organic adoption and automatic deployment on new machines. Easy-to-integrate: Easily integrated with existing workflows and tools, including Jira issue tracker (with more than 2.6 million issues).

Easily integrated with existing workflows and tools, including Jira issue tracker (with more than 2.6 million issues). Easy-to-manage: User-friendly System Console for administrators, deep and complete documentation and an engaged open source community that shares tips and best practices.

User-friendly System Console for administrators, deep and complete documentation and an engaged open source community that shares tips and best practices. Private and secure: An on-premises solution enables total control, ensuring internal communications are secure.

An on-premises solution enables total control, ensuring internal communications are secure. Popular and open: Open source projects continually improve as technology evolves, increasing engagement and productivity.

Learn More

Are you looking to reclaim time and increase productivity in your enterprise? Do you seek to simplify and modernize your communications tools while ensuring privacy and compliance? Get in touch with the Mattermost customer team to learn how we can help your organization get to the next level.

About Wargaming

Wargaming is an award-winning online game developer and publisher and one of the leaders in the free-to-play MMO market. Founded as a privately held company in 1998, Wargaming has shipped over 15 titles. Currently, Wargaming is focused on its team-based MMO war series dedicated to the mid-20th century warfare that includes the armored World of Tanks, the flight combat World of Warplanes, and the naval World of Warships. The three intertwined titles form a common gaming universe integrated within the portal www.wargaming.net.

As part of its multiplatform line-up, the company has introduced World of Tanks on Xbox and World of Tanks Blitz on mobile platforms, Windows 10 PCs and Mac OS X. Launched in 2014 and 2015, World of Tanks on Xbox introduced epic tank-on-tank battles to console gamers and offers the first cross-platform gaming experience between Xbox 360 and Xbox One. In 2016, Wargaming released World of Tanks for PlayStation®4, continuing its console campaign.

About Mattermost

Mattermost provides enterprise-grade collaboration solutions for the world’s leading organizations on a vibrant open source platform. Our private, hybrid and public cloud solutions offer secure, configurable, highly scalable messaging across web, mobile and PC with archiving, search, and deep integration across in-house systems.