State of Founderia: Q2 2021 — persistence and scale
Persistence is hard. Scale is harder. This quarter we hit our first real concurrency targets and learned a lot about what breaks when you assume the world never stops. We're not publishing numbers yet. We're publishing progress.
Most multiplayer games scale the same way: you partition the world. Shards. Instances. Copies of the map so no single server has to hold everyone. It works—until you care about one coherent world. We want everyone to share the same simulation. Same time, same space, same state. That means we're running into the structural limits the whole industry has: hosting costs that spike with concurrency, consistency problems when state is split across machines, and the brutal truth that the world state is rarely a single coherent simulation in today's architectures. We're not okay with "rarely." We're pushing toward "always."
What we learned this quarter
We hit our first real concurrency targets. Things broke. Good breaks—the kind that teach you where the ceiling is. We learned that sharding solves scale but fragments social cohesion; players can't reliably occupy the same space at the same time when the world is chopped into pieces. We learned that high-fidelity simulation and strict consistency don't play nice with "just add more servers." And we learned that the next wave of multiplayer isn't about bigger maps—it's about relaxing these constraints: making simulation cheaper, more elastic, and less fragmented so the world can feel like one place.
We're not there yet. But we're building the foundation. Progress over numbers. More soon.