How Gameye got Clone Drone out of the Danger Zone

Challenge

What happens when your provider disappears?

Doborog had launched the game, built up their community and were happily sailing forward – regularly adding new content to their popular title. But then their server provider got bought out by a bigger platform – and they discontinued the ‘legacy’ platform that Doborog was using. Migrating to the new system meant they had to build a new matchmaker. So it was time to start looking around for an alternative for running game servers.

Solution

Use an agnostic platform

During their research into game server orchestration platforms, Doborog came across Gameye. Our agnostic platform had a few advantages: they weren’t wedded to any single provider, they could integrate any matchmaker they wanted, and they could easily scale when they needed to. Not only that, but we were significantly cheaper than their previous provider. After migrating to our platform, Doborog noticed a significant reduction in their monthly bill, approximately 60% less than with their previous provider.

A platform they could rely on

In 2022, Doborog’s old provider discontinued the matchmaking and server orchestration systems Clone Drone in the Danger Zone relied on, leaving Doborog in the lurch. They could’ve migrated over to the provider’s newer system – but after carefully evaluating the situation, it felt like the right time to explore other options.

“That was when we decided to move to Gameye,” said Brian Jordan, co-founder and CTO at Doborog. “Their model for deployment and operation is super simple compared to other big, bare-metal providers. You just upload your game server container image and they’ll make it available in the regions you’d like. Sure, we could have migrated to our old provider’s new system, but Gameye was much simpler.”

Part of this is that we use open-source tools and don’t lock our clients into a single provider. He also mentioned that the APIs are easy to work with and he can use tools like Postman and their suite of integration tests to make sure that everything is working.

Moving over to our systems wasn’t just simpler. It also came with a range of other benefits for them.

Saving 60% on their bills

“Gameye was a huge step up from that legacy system,” Brian explained. “And the price was much better. The way the other system was set up, it was more expensive and we’d get bad performance over time because they’d throttle resources after a certain amount of uptime.”

Brian calculated that they were now spending approximately 63% less each month on Gameye compared to what they were paying before. A huge saving by anyone’s standards. This was largely because we worked with Doborog to establish a fair pricing model that suited their needs.

Getting a more reliable system

“With the old provider, there would periodically be server-side hiccups that would cause players to experience lag or choppy gameplay,” Brian said. “Once we moved over – those issues just went away.”

The reason for the issue was down to their game server’s resource profile and the provider’s server capacity. Their old provider didn’t offer the same hands-on game server resource profiling and planning that we do – and so the game server wasn’t able to run at peak performance for entire gameplay sessions. Now, we’ve worked with them to figure out their correct resource profile, so they’re getting the CPU power they need. According to Brian, this has meant that their performance is much more consistent and stable.

Our platform has also had far better uptime than their previous provider.

“There was a game server request API we relied on which would periodically go up and then back down,” Brian said. “As a whole, the Gameye request system has been remarkably stable. We no longer have the outages that we used to. With the old system we’d get hours or even days of downtime – now, we get zero downtime or service outage.”

This means that Doborog is no longer sitting around helplessly waiting for the service to come back online. And – because of our support team – we can keep them updated if we need to perform routine maintenance. (Though, with our system – we get around that issue by performing updates with phased rollouts.)

Reaching more regions than before

One issue Doborog had was that players in certain regions, like Hong Kong, were complaining about their old servers. Their old provider just didn’t have the regional reach to satisfy those requests.

“We’d had a few negative reviews in the past about ping in those regions and players were upset that there weren’t servers close to them,” Brian said. “We just don’t get those complaints any more.”

Sometimes, silence is the reward we get for a job well done. But behind the scenes, it means that we’ve been able to provide servers across the world – from the west coast of the US, to Europe and even mainland Asia.

Scaling when surprises hit

Another benefit to our system is that it can automatically scale and support them, even if they have a huge spike in new players.

“It’s reassuring to know that we could scale up indefinitely as we prepare for platform events and sales,” Brian explained. “For example, when we have seasonal sales – we don’t need to worry about the scalability of our game servers. We can take those opportunities as they come, which means we can increase our playerbase.”

All in all, the switch to Gameye was a positive step forward for Doborog. Not only were they paying far less than before, but they were getting a more reliable system, weren’t locked into specific tools, had a much wider regional footprint and were able to scale with us when they needed it.