Nubs! is a success story. Not because everything went perfectly, but because they planned for different scenarios and designed their game to handle it.
When Nubs!: Arena launched in May 2025, they expected a strong, but manageable, debut. What they got instead was a surge of players three times greater than they predicted.
Thankfully, they were prepared for the best (and worst) case scenario.
So, how did the developers, Rangatang and Glowfish Interactive, manage to keep the experience smooth while player numbers soared? And, more importantly, what can other developers learn from their story?
If there’s one consistent lesson we see from multiplayer game launches, it’s that your forecast is almost certainly going to be wrong. In the case of Nubs!: Arena, the team used their Steam wishlist numbers to predict the demand on launch day. Perfectly sensible.
But you can’t predict everything. On the day, they had around three times more people jump on than they had wishlists on Steam.
This isn’t unusual. In fact, it’s increasingly common. Whether demand is higher or lower than you planned, tying your infrastructure directly to your projections will always be a gamble. What Nubs! proves that flexibility, not prediction, is what keeps a game online.
One of the most valuable things Rangatang did was design for unpredictability. Part of that was choosing our orchestrator. This meant they could spin up servers dynamically based on actual player demand. Even when new regions (like Asia) surged with unexpectedly high numbers, they didn’t need to scramble to set up new instances by hand. The system scaled with them, in real time.
“Gameye was always very responsive,” Machiel van Hooren from Rangatang said. “We had a lot of players in Asia, so Gameye had to scale up the servers there for us. But things went very smoothly.”
This kind of infrastructure resilience doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from designing your systems to expect stress, not just survive it.
In the weeks leading up to release, Nubs! benefited from something many studios overlook: playtest environments that reflect real-world conditions. We gave them access to a test environment, which let them simulate actual match behaviour across the world.
One of the most common issues developers run into is assuming that a local test environment, or even a small internal QA pass, will be enough to highlight the kind of edge cases that happen at scale. But they won’t.
Good infrastructure lets teams run these simulations without breaking their budget or burning time. You don’t want your first encounter with game-breaking downtime to happen while you’re live on Steam’s front page.
Nubs! is a success story. Not because everything went perfectly, but because they planned for different scenarios and designed their game to handle it.
So here’s what you can take away from their experience:
In short: expect chaos. And plan for it.
We’ll help you simulate, scale, and stress-test your game before Day 1. Get in touch with our crew to learn more.
