How Munzee Keeps Gameplay Real with IronMQ

This post is part of a series of customer success stories highlighting key customers and how they are using Iron.io to do some pretty big things.


Munzee is a 21st century scavenger hunt that utilizes iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile apps to create a modern-day, high-tech adventure game. Munzee QR Codes and NFC Tags are captured or deployed by players allowing them to earn points, unlock badges, and compete in clans against each other.

Scott Foster Co-Founder / VP of Technology Munzee

What problem did Munzee face before Iron?

An initial concern with the launch of Munzee was an increasing demand for background processing to handle tasks secondary to active gameplay. We needed a way to handle outbound email, validation checks, and other asynchronous processing associated with gameplay. This needed to be done without slowing the user down in their effort to capture and deploy munzees.

Our previous solution required a tremendous amount of time and effort to maintain, optimize, and monitor.  This eventually caused reliability issues for our small team whose main focus was to provide a great gaming experience for our users.

Where does Iron.io fit and how does it help?

While exploring solutions, we discovered IronMQ and instantly fell in love with it! Being able to offload messages via a RESTful API to a 3rd party provider has saved our company time, money, and the headaches/hassles of constant maintenance.

Seeing all of our messages in real-time allows us to scale when we need to. IronMQ has great client libraries for processing and delivering messages, which is always a plus for any cloud-based messaging queue service.

What have the results been like?

On Cyber Monday of this year (Dec 2nd, 2013), we put IronMQ to the real test with our Cyber Monday Holiday sale. We anticipated a heavy increase in traffic with sudden spikes, but weren't confident in which queues would be used the most. When we “opened the floodgates” for our Holiday sale, we went from a few messages at a time to hundreds of messages in a matter of seconds.

Queuing up all of these messages has lets us scale only the resources we need in order to process the gaming workloads. This gave us tremendous time and cost savings, while still allowing us to get all the messages and events processed in as soon as possible.

Any final thoughts?

I tip my hat to you IronMQ! You’ve allowed Munzee access to better insight of what we need to manage and keep running server-wise. Now we can spend our time focusing on the important things – like getting people out in the real world to have fun with the Munzee game!

For those interested in exploring the world in a whole new way, you can play Munzee by downloading the free app from the App Store, Windows Store, or Google Play. (@munzee)