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Studios are being forced more than ever to look after every penny and that’s especially important with online services infrastructure. It can often be a studio’s largest expense after payroll. For us, getting control of costs starts before a project begins. We


always kick off with an infrastructure review and as part of that, checking that the studio is using its compute efficiently is high on the list. This includes things like machine sizing for gameservers and game back end, development environment efficiency and looking for bits of infrastructure that are unused or not providing the value. Once we know we have a good day-to-day baseline, we setup a regular cadence for reviewing costs. This often helps to catch unwanted spend. Recently what we’ve seen is that testing environments are being left


scaled up and then forgotten about in frenzy that follows shipping. Also, you’d be shocked at how many gameserver machines are only using half of their resources and making inefficient use of the CPU and Memory.


Studios need to focus on the creative side of game development. How does Multiplayer Wizards ensure that the technical challenges of managing multiplayer infrastructure don’t get in the way? I think a lot of this boils down to clear communication about what’s coming or changing. Many studios struggle with the thrash of constantly moving goalposts – new ship dates, new technology, new requirements, new season launches... A good example might be Production want to ship a new game mode.


Game designers might start thinking about this a few months before it makes its way into production; then game developers hit the editor and get the initial alpha of the feature done. Then a playtest happens, which means the feature is deployed into a dev environment. Once the fun has been found and QA have given their feedback, some tweaks happen before it then gets shipped to prod. From an infrastructure perspective, that new feature needs to have some sort of profiling to make sure it’s not affecting the amount of CPU and Memory it uses on the gameserver. We then need to think about infrastructure capacity. Because if we ship a new feature to prod, there is a good chance that we will see a bump in player numbers coming to try it out! All this to say, if we set up effective comms between teams, folks know


about new features and changes early; all the technical groundwork can be done in tandem, meaning that we can ship faster and remove even more infrastructure burden from the studios!


You’ve been described as the ‘best friend studios never knew they had.’ How does your team go the extra mile to support studios during migrations and beyond? First and foremost, our engineers are gamers. They have lived and breathed bad launches from a player’s perspective and know how frustrating it is when all you want to do is play! Our internal mindset of “Act Like a Studio” (which really means “Treat Each Game with as Much Care as the Studio Would”) is part of our culture and it’s not uncommon to see our engineers playing the games we work on in their own downtime. Recently, we saw a case of one of our GSOC (Game Services Operations


Centre) team pop into Slack on her day off and report a cheater in a game! 30 minutes later the player was banned!


Outside of this, we set game studios up so that someone is watching


and actioning game telemetry 24x7. They are supported by our global GSOC Engineers every single day of the year. One cool example of ways we try to really go above and beyond was with a recent game launch, lots of our team were playing before the launch went live and found a game-ending bug when playing with certain Windows settings. We reported and it was fixed before the launch, saving a huge amount of player (and studio!) pain.


For studios considering outsourcing their backend infrastructure, what’s the main value Multiplayer Wizards brings that makes the process faster, cheaper, and more efficient? “Multiplayer Wizards helps games studios migrate, launch and scale live service games without the chaos. A cost-effective extension of your studio, and with fewer late-night fire drills.” This is our mantra and something we love. We focus heavily on


recruiting and developing smart Wizards who have shipped games and use that expertise to help studios double down on making their game more awesome. This saves studios money by them not having to hire a full team of specialists – plus all the overheads that come with that – and takes the risk management off their plate, too! Looking to the future, how do you see Multiplayer Wizards evolving


as a partner for studios in the multiplayer gaming space? This is such a hard question as our industry moves at such pace! Here


are a few trends we are keeping an eye on: For years the gameserver industry has been talking about the benefits


of ‘Hybrid’ hosting, which is where we use a certain percentage of bare metal machines (inflexible, but cheaper) with a small percentage of cloud machines (very flexible, but expensive). This model was a fantastic, best-of-both-worlds scenario. We are starting to see the dial shift, as cloud prices come down and become more aggressive with things like lower bandwidth costs. On the flipside, we are also seeing some of the bare metal providers introduce new products that allow you to spin up cheaper bare metal in a more flexible way. It will be really interesting to see if a ‘gold standard’ emerges as the industry shifts. We are seeing a trend with more and more live service elements


being built into single player games – I believe we’ll start to see a blurred line between the traditional divide of single player experiences and multiplayer games. In multiplayer games, we’ve seen a few different styles of gameserver – P2P/Relay servers, which handle the game calculation on the client side; and dedicated gameservers, where the server is authoritative and does the calculations. We are seeing a lot more ‘authoritative relay’ approaches, where some of the less critical calculations are client side, but the gameserver still remains authoritative, allowing ongoing server costs to stay low – a smart approach for suitable games. Maybe I haven’t exactly answered your


question, but rest assured that as the industry shifts, so will Multiplayer Wizards! One thing that won’t change, though… we’ll always love your game as much as you do.


Find out more about the work Tom and his team of Multiplayer Wizards does by visiting codewizards.io


August/September 2025 MCV/DEVELOP | 17


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