HOW’S YOUR BACKEND? (BUT FIRST OF ALL, WHAT IS IT?)


Michelle Gimsing, business development sorceress at Code Wizards, breaks down the what a backend is, and gets into how the magic of multiplayer happens


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ix weeks in at Code Wizards Group as their newly appointed Studio Success Sorceress, and I find myself asking for the bajillionth time, “but what do you mean by the backend?”. My


cheeks burn and I’m lowkey stressing (highkey ATP) that all these engineers in the office overhearing this and thinking: BFFR. Okay so, I’m not coming into the gametech sphere completely


rawdogging it – I came from a console porting studio before (though I did call C# ‘C Hashtag’ on my first day at Warp Digital Entertainment). I’d just about understood the intricacies of porting; the complexities of different platforms and their requirements, the unique challenges each engine posed. And now I was back at the bottom of the proverbial hill calling it a “backend server” (which


22 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2026


I realised about a month in was basically saying potato potato). Progress. Woo. So, I asked a few of the Wizards to sit down with me and literally r/ELI5 on what this magical backend is and how multiplayer works. (Hey – it’s not mansplaining if you asked for the explanation in the first place). Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth (or the 70’s


as it’s come to be known), the Client-Server Model was invented. This is the foundation of the modern server system we know today. And where the individual devices (the “client”) can request services, information or resources from a central computer (the “server”) through a network.


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