Behind the scenes: how we're thinking about server architecture
We get asked a lot how the world stays up. Short answer: redundancy, state machines, and a lot of testing. Long answer would require a white paper. Here's the medium answer—enough to show we're not winging it.
The core simulation is authoritative on our servers. Clients render a local view, predict motion to hide latency, and reconcile when the server disagrees. That part is standard. What we're building toward is the next step: treating game servers not as bespoke pets but as schedulable, containerized workloads. The industry is moving there—containerization, orchestration, policy-driven control planes. When you can allocate, roll, and retire server capacity with the same discipline as high-traffic web services, you can run region-specific events, short-lived modes, and experiments that would have been operationally insane a few years ago.
Redundancy and state machines
We don't rely on a single box. We run redundant nodes, state machines that know how to fail over, and a lot of tests that simulate exactly the failures we don't want to see in production. If a match or a region degrades, we want to attribute the cause to a specific build, region, or bottleneck—and eventually respond automatically. Better instrumentation → faster iteration → more ambitious live ops. That's the loop we're building.
The trade-off we're watching
Game servers love high tick rates and predictable CPU. They often use UDP-based protocols that don't fit neatly into generic cloud assumptions. We're evaluating encrypted transport for handoff and mobile paths where connection migration matters. So we're not going full elastic overnight. Some experiences stay on tuned dedicated hardware; others will move toward orchestration where a few milliseconds of overhead are worth the cost and complexity savings. The winners will be teams that design gameplay that tolerates variability and still feels responsive. We're aiming to be one of them.