How Draw Something Blew Up Without Blowing Up

Now here is a game for everyone! It doesn’t matter how well you can draw, you can just draw and laugh with your friends at your attempts! This app has become very popular and quite quickly, the How Draw Something Blew Up Without Blowing Up infographic from The Next Web (with help from Couchbase) charts the growing trendiness of this game.

Draw Something was downloaded 50 million times in 50 days. Users created billions of drawings, adding 3,000 new pictures every second. On March 21st, OMPOP, the company behind the game, was bought up by Zynga for more than $200 million. On the first weekend in April, I downloaded the game for my first time and was admittedly addicted for 72 hours.

Today, a company called Couchbase gave us the exclusive on an infographic that charts the app’s viral growth. In case you’ve not heard of Couchbase, it’s the platform that enabled the game to keep up with its NoSQL database technology — from 6 database servers to more than 90 — without a second of game downtime. That’s impressive.

The infographic below charts the amount of user data, drawings per second, number of servers used to keep the game up and going and the number of users over 8 weeks of the game’s mind-blowing growth. The only question now is, will the game’s addictive nature keep fans or will they get over it as quickly as I have?

Intended as a quick summary of Draw Something’s growth, and Couchbase’s success in supporting their database expansion needs, this infographic does a good job.  Simple, easy-to-understand visuals, and use of some hand-sketch illustrations to reinforce how Draw Something works.

Some visualizations in the Billions of Drawings section would have been nice to communicate the immense scale of the growth numbers.  Most readers don’t truly grasp the difference between 10 million and 2 billion by just reading the text numbers.