Announcing Databricks’ Offer for Games Startups

Databricks is excited to announce an expansion to our startup offer, providing game studios access to free credits, expert advice and a data and AI ecosystem that can rally behind you. Our goal is to help you make the best games possible for your community, bringing more play to the world!

Summary

Here’s a summary of what game studios receive as part of this offer:

• $50,000 worth of Databricks credits to get you going
• Complimentary technical support for questions, breakfixes and tuning
• Access to Databricks technical resources to help guide you on your journey
• 5 free licenses for Sigma Computing’s dashboarding solution for 6 months
• HeroicLabs 3-months free of Satori and 25% off of Hiro’s licensing fee for a year 
• Snowplow Community Edition is a self-managed, open-source data pipeline solution for teams to explore, test, and build event data collection and real-time insights, before scaling to production. Sign up for community edition here
• Grow your startup with AWS by joining the AWS Activate Program

Teams can get started today by Applying Here

The Databricks Startup Offer for Games

The Databricks Platform is the best platform for you to handle all core data needs from Data ingestion, to ETL, to Data Warehousing, Analytics and ML/AI. You’ll have access to a technical team that has helped game companies of all sizes solve games business use cases from player experience and engagement, through de-risking game development and live operations to making it easier for all team members to get quick access to data backed insight. Curious what use cases we’re talking about, check out our games page here for details, customer stories and technical solution accelerators.

With the startup offer for games you’ll get up to $50,000 worth of Databricks usage credits:

• 100% of your usage for the first four months, up to $2,000 total plus free shared technical services
• 75% of your usage for the second four months, up to $16,000 total plus free business tier support
• 50% of your usage for months 8-12, up to $32,000 total plus free business tier support
• Ready? Apply Here

This is just the start of what our offer unlocks.  We’ve worked with top industry partners to bring you even more value and to help further your success.

Understand your Player's Journey in real time with Snowplow

Snowplow offers a comprehensive data analytics solution for gaming companies, providing a powerful toolset to capture, process, and analyze player data across multiple touchpoints. Snowplow enables:

• Unified data collection infrastructure capturing end-to-end insights from the player acquisition right through to in-game experience and retention.
• Real-Time event stream processing optimized for Databricks as the central source of truth for Player insights
• Robust identity solution strategy with cross-platform web and mobile identity stitching for known and anonymous users
• Flexible tracking and data modeling framework to power a variety of use cases across marketing, in-game personalization and recommendations and monetization

HeroicLabs Can Help You Make LiveOperations Easy

As a game developer, your time is best spent building the most engaging experiences possible. Players now expect a robust meta, competitive, and social systems to engage them beyond your core game loop.

By using Heroic Labs products such as Hiro (Game Framework) and Satori (LiveOps Tooling) you can build modern, deeply social, and personalized games and experiences that are built upon proven tech, used by some of the world's largest developers to generate billions in annual revenue.

Create next generation game experiences with AWS

In partnership with Amazon, AWS for Games gives you everything you need to build, run, and grow innovative gaming experiences. Leaders across the games industry rely on AWS’ more than 16 years of games expertise to launch and run some of the world’s biggest games including Fortnite, Roblox, and League of Legends. AWS and over 300 AWS Games Partners, including Databricks, offer the broadest and deepest set of purpose-built services and pre-built solutions for cloud game development, content creation, game backend & infrastructure, and player acquisition, retention & monetization. These empower game developers to build healthy global player communities, gain player insights, and personalize and monetize player experiences to build lifelong fans. 750 million gamers each month, around the world, play games built on AWS.

Let’s Meet at GDC 2025!

Throughout the week, Databricks will have a series of game data and AI talks led by our dedicated games experts, our tech and services partners, our product teams and our customers. Check out the schedule when you arrive. If there’s a topic about Data and Games that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you!

We will also have a series of demos running throughout the week.

• Real Time Game Telemetry with EPAM, HeroicLabs and Sigma
• Solving for cold start Problems with Snowplow and Databricks
• Dashboarding for Games made easy with Sigma Computing
• Player feedback analysis at scale
• AI powered BI for game studios
• Reinforcement learning based learning agents with Unreal Engine
• LLM enhanced player segmentation
• And much more!

Interested in learning more? Book a meeting with us.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Huntting Buckley, GTM Leader

Games @ Databricks