This is a really old question that still comes up as a top result in 2024 nearly 12 years later. Because of that I wanted to provide an update.

If you wanted to get real-time analytics out of a game platform in 2024 you might want to use some more modern systems, including:

• Apache Pinot (real-time OLAP at scale; actual column store; disclosure: I work for StarTree, which is powered by Apache Pinot).
• ClickHouse (real-time OLAP; actual column store; limited to <1,000 QPS per replica(
• MongoDB (more OLTP, and NoSQL, but a lot of shops use it)
• ScyllaDB (larger scale NoSQL OLTP; wide-column) — use this instead of HBase in 2024
• Postgres (SQL OLTP, but is a Swiss army knife for data)

There are literally hundreds of modern databases to choose from. And though HBase is still around, it wouldn't be my first go-to choice. Try to determine if you really want/need a full-on analytics database, in which case you probably want an actual column store database, or whether you just want some analytics out of your operational datastore.

Also, to be clear: a wide column database, like ScyllaDB or HBase, is actually a row store; not a column store.