Paradox Interactive goes composable with a migration from Salesforce to Commerce Layer.
Paradox Interactive AB is a leading global publisher of strategy and grand strategy games for the PC that are intellectually challenging, have long lifespans, and present great opportunities for immersion and community. Over five million gamers from all over the world play a Paradox Interactive game each month. Their most successful game series include Surviving Mars, Cities: Skylines, Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, and Crusader Kings. Headquartered in Sweden, Paradox Interactive works with renowned distributors worldwide and are present on all major digital download portals, serving an international members community.
Finding the right technology to power a growing and successful digital business
Paradox Interactive was in a position to re-evaluate its tech stack and consider new partners as they scaled. The new solution would have to support their expansion objectives whilst delivering performance improvements, ensuring site reliability and freeing up developer resources. Their new solution would also need to integrate with Xsolla, a payment gateway favored within the gaming industry because it offers a variety of payment methods, including credit cards, digital wallets, prepaid cards, and local payment options, making it easier for players worldwide to make purchases in games.
Implementing a composable commerce solution for a company with scaling ambitions
Upon researching the market, Paradox Interactive’s technology team opted for a composable commerce approach based on the following stack/tools:
- Commerce engine — Commerce Layer
- CMS — Contentful
- Payment gateway — Xsolla
- SSG — Next.js
- PIM — custom
The integration of Xsolla was made possible through Commerce Layer’s external payment gateway feature. With a 100% focus on commerce, the company has integrations with some of the most popular payment gateways — Adyen, Axerve, Braintree, Checkout.com, Klarna, Paypal, and Stripe — and continually adds new gateways to its roadmap. In addition, Commerce Layer allows developers to set up and configure external payment gateways and define custom endpoint(s) responding to the following actions: authorization, capture, void, and customer token. The external endpoint is responsible for the integration with the payment gateway. This approach lets brands offer the most relevant and trusted payment methods where trust matters most — at checkout.
I was pleased to see how easily and quickly the developer team learned to use Commerce Layer. It is a developer-friendly platform with excellent documentation and readily accessible support.
Choosing a composable solution also improved Paradox Interactive’s site performance and stability. Composable sites load faster because components are API-first and the isolation of services allows a team to optimize each component. Commerce Layer isolates all transaction data (prices, stock availability, promotions, etc.) enabling each step of the purchase process to be fully optimized.
With a large and loyal community of gamers, launching a new game creates traffic and order spikes. With Commerce Layer’s focus on transactions, Paradox Interactive benefits from an autoscaling feature. The replatforming project ran smoothly and the new site was created with an internal developer team.