When Chivalry 2 released on Xbox Game Pass they had 711% more peak sessions than ever before. And it all went off without a hitch. Here’s how.
On Tuesday 4th October, Chivalry 2 launched on Xbox Game Pass. It was a monumental occasion for them, bringing in over half a million new players to their game in just a week. At its peak, they had 711% more sessions running than their average concurrent sessions.
Here’s how our automated platform managed to make sure that it all went smoothly.
Tripwire, the Publisher for Chivalry 2, knew they’d be launching in October – so they came to us back in August to make sure that our servers would be able to handle the huge surge of players that they were expecting.
These surges are nothing new to Gameye. We’ve orchestrated big surges in the past without any downtime. We also helped Chivalry 2 with their original launch and had seen how popular the game was – and how many sessions they had back then. And they knew this would be even bigger.
So we looked at their peak number of players in June, how much it spiked at their original launch, and their estimates for how many new players they’d regularly have after launching on Game Pass. These figures helped us extrapolate out and see how many sessions we might need to handle.
Once Chivalry 2 went live on Game Pass, the sessions began to flood in. During their busiest time, we were handling nearly 10,000 API requests every hour – requests like starting a session, getting logs, stopping sessions or listing current sessions. From our end, it’s important to make sure that these requests aren’t mixed up and don’t slip through the cracks.
In the end, we were handling almost 150,000 requests every day, just for Chivalry 2. At its peak, we hit over 9,200 requests in one hour. All without dropping a single one. And that’s while still managing the request from all our other clients.
It’s worth remembering that each session is a full-on match of either 40 or 64 players, depending on the specific match. From a planning perspective, we need to assume that every session will be incredibly resource-intensive – a 64-player match. But once the session actually launches – it only takes up the resources it actually needs.
By putting a plan in place, communicating with the clever minds at Torn Banner and Tripwire, and getting ready for launch day – we were able to make sure that their launch went off without a hitch. Without a single second of downtime on our end.
If you’d like to learn more about how our automated platform makes sure multiplayer games can always launch a session, feel free to join our Discord and badger us with questions. We always love to chat.
