How PlayStation Optimized Performance and Revenue for Their Digital Store with GraphQL Federation
Valeria Gomez
This post is part of our GraphQL Summit 2024 customer series, highlighting how leading teams are using Apollo to accelerate development and build world-class applications. Join hundreds of your peers this October as we return for GraphQL Summit 2025.
PlayStation, a leader in the gaming industry, has transformed its digital store experience by integrating GraphQL into its architecture. Powering experiences across PS5, PlayStation VR, Portal, Mobile, and PlayStation’s services ecosystem, the platform gives users access to a library of games, including in-house creations like God of War, Spider-Man, and their latest hit, Astrobot. At GraphQL Summit 2024, Devashree Shirude, Senior Software Engineer at PlayStation, shared how the company overhauled its digital store experience with federated GraphQL with Apollo, effectively orchestrating multiple backend APIs into a unified, high-performance experience.
The API Orchestration Challenge
When preparing for the PS5 launch, PlayStation examined their tech stack and identified business bottlenecks in its existing REST-based architecture. The system placed heavy computational logic on the client side, leading to duplicate code across platforms and inconsistent user experiences.
“If you’ve ever bought a game or add-on on PlayStation, you might be wondering what made our stores look so consistent or so robust when you switch between mobile and web platforms,” Devashree explained.
However, achieving this consistency was difficult. Each platform, console, web, and mobile, had to manage its own business logic – a complex web of APIs. Each platform had to independently orchestrate these APIs, resulting in duplicated orchestration logic, redundant implementations, and data inconsistencies across devices.
What PlayStation needed was a centralized, declarative approach to API orchestration that could handle the complex business logic while allowing each platform to maintain its unique experience.
The Path to GraphQL
The shift to GraphQL was guided by a core principle, as Devashree noted: “At PlayStation, we believe that every application should offer a unique experience to our users.” Instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all approach, PlayStation used GraphQL to create a unified data layer, allowing platforms to maintain customized user experiences while leveraging a shared backend.
Implementation Strategy
Centralized API Orchestration
GraphQL federation with Apollo provided PlayStation with a declarative approach to API orchestration. Instead of each client writing procedural code to chain API calls, transform responses, and handle errors, these orchestration patterns were defined once in the GraphQL layer.
This orchestration layer automatically handles critical concerns like sequencing API calls, parallelizing requests where possible, transforming data into the exact shape needed by clients, and implementing resilience patterns like retries and fallbacks. It provided a consistent foundation while allowing platforms to maintain unique user journeys.
One example is the wishlist feature. “Though the UI looks compact, thousands of computations are happening in the backend,” shared Devashree. Instead of separate implementations for each platform, GraphQL resolvers now centrally handle wishlist operations, while platforms retain control over UI design and interactions.
Revolutionizing Business Logic
One of the most significant improvements came from centralizing complex business computations. “What I see on the screen would be different from what you see on the screen,” Devashree explained. These computations take into account various factors including user subscriptions, past purchases, entitlements, and loyalty tier status.
By moving these computations from the client layer to GraphQL federation, PlayStation eliminated the need for duplicate code across platforms.
Optimizing Performance with Apollo Client
To accelerate performance and enhance user experience, PlayStation adopted Apollo Client 3.7’s @defer directive to quickly create a progressive loading experience for users. “Rather than loading everything at once, we break down the UI into chunks, ensuring users see important details first. This not only improves speed but also positively impacts revenue,” Devashree noted.
With deferred loading, PlayStation saw faster page interactions, improved conversion rates, and better overall store performance.
Best Practices and Lessons Learned
Devashree emphasized the importance of cross-functional collaboration: “Break those barriers, go out there and talk to your cross-functional groups, like your product team, your user experience team, your design team saying that hey, we already have this available, why not build on top of it?” By encouraging collaboration, PlayStation ensured developers, designers, and product teams aligned on GraphQL capabilities, and new features leveraged existing GraphQL logic instead of reinventing the wheel.
However, Devashree cautioned about potential pitfalls: “be careful of regressions, each app has its own character, each application has its own tech stack… if something is happening on Windows, not necessarily it’s gonna happen on iOS because they are two different OSs.” By maintaining platform-specific flexibility, PlayStation balanced consistency with customization.
Takeaways
With GraphQL federation, PlayStation has built a robust foundation that accelerates performance, boosts developer efficiency, and streamlines updates. Mobile updates, which previously required lengthy app store approvals, can now be shipped faster since core logic resides in GraphQL rather than in platform-specific applications.
By cutting development time through code reuse, accelerating store performance with smart loading strategies, and maintaining cross-platform consistency while allowing for customization, PlayStation has created a more efficient, scalable digital store experience.
“API orchestration used to be a major pain point for us,” Devashree reflected. “With federation, we’ve transformed it into a competitive advantage. Our teams can focus on building great gaming experiences instead of wrestling with the complexities of connecting multiple backend services.”
To learn more from Devashree and PlayStation’s journey, watch her full session from GraphQL Summit 2024.
