Discover how Nubs!: Arena handled a global launch and a deterministic design philosophy with Gameye’s scalable server orchestration.
On 15 May 2025, Nubs!: Arena made its debut to a pleasant surprise: a surge of players. They had around three times more people jump on than they had wishlists on Steam. For a brief moment, they were even second behind the new Doom game in terms of the number of active players.
Despite the unexpected spike, they had enough servers to keep pace. As the player count racked up, our orchestrator simply spun up new sessions to handle the load.
Rangatang and Glowfish Interactive teamed up to create this chaotic brawler. Feeling like a mix of battle royale, Super Smash Bros, and a roguelike, Nubs! relies on playing with (and against) other players.
Games like Nubs! rely on having stable, scalable servers. This was particularly true on launch day. With influencers hopping on the game, making it free for the day, and thousands of wishlists, it’s wise to plan for the best outcome. But it was also a global launch, across the Americas, Asia and Europe. So they weren’t entirely sure where in the world they would get the most attention.
That’s why they turned to Gameye. Our orchestrator automatically scales to cope with the number of sessions, wherever those sessions might be. In the end, it turned out that Asia was easily their most popular region. And while that wasn’t a complete surprise, the sheer scale in Asia was far more than they’d anticipated.
“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.”
During development, Rangatang realised that they needed a dedicated matchmaker, so they turned to Nakama. But they still wanted more control over the servers themselves through our orchestrator.
“The Gameye APIs are pretty straightforward, so it’s easy to integrate with other apps,” Machiel said. “We didn’t even need to use the integration provided by Gameye. It’s just a couple of API calls.”
During development, it’s essential to playtest your game and make sure that everything is working correctly. So in the year leading up to their launch, we offered Rangatang free use of our orchestrator and a sandbox server. Even just hosting multiple instances for playtests wasn’t any problem. This allowed them to make sure everything was working, without racking up costs.
And after launch, our orchestrator makes it easy to create a test environment.
One key development philosophy that Rangatang followed was to make sure that everything was deterministic. They wanted to be able to easily recreate matches and reproduce any crashes, just by replaying the data.
“It’s best to look into making your server fully deterministic and record the incoming packets,” Machiel said. “It’s a lot of effort to implement, but now we can record all that to the log. Gameye’s APIs make it easy to scrape those logs from the servers.”
This is part of a broader philosophy of performance by design. Rangatang headed into development knowing that they wanted to keep their CPU footprint as small as possible. Due to the way our servers are set up, this made it far more efficient for their bottom line.
“What’s nice about Gameye is that they look at what you’re using in terms of performance. It’s worth the effort to optimize,” he said. “If you’re using a Unity Dedicated server, it’s a big black box. So there’s not that much you can do in terms of performance optimization. But with our own dedicated server, written in C++, we can see under the hood.”
In the weeks after their launch, Rangatang is working on fixing bugs and making the game as fun as possible. But now it’s time to start work on their next project. In fact, they’re interested in working with other developers, especially indies needing help setting up a multiplayer game. (So feel free to reach out to them.)
In the meantime, if you need help with setting up your servers, get in touch with our team and we’ll walk you through the process.
