Maintaining reliable performance fosters player satisfaction, encouraging them to stay invested in your game for the long haul and keep them coming back for more. When player count starts to grow, you need to be able to scale up quickly with demand, meeting players where they are. This case study shows you how Apex Legends scaled up globally at launch.
Similarly, as Among Us became a sudden smash hit, Innersloth needed to ensure it could continue to provide an optimal experience for players. By partnering with Unity, they were able to deliver a stable online environment with Game Server Hosting (Multiplay), all while gaining the data they needed to deliver new features to their fanbase using Unity Analytics.
“The teams at Unity have honestly been fantastic partners to work with,” said Callum Underwood, founder of Robot Teddy, an agency that partnered with Innersloth on Among Us. “They understand games, they’re really easy to talk to, and, more importantly, they have always put our small dev team’s needs above all else.”
Geographical coverage is key for any gaming infrastructure and so is the ability to cope with any surge in demand. Game Server Hosting recently powered over 77 million game sessions globally and enabled studios to deploy to 290+ data centers worldwide, helping games thrive no matter where players are in the world.*
“When we’re thinking about how to scale, the fact that the infrastructure is there worldwide, and we’re distributing worldwide, makes it so much easier for us to reach our audience in the end,” said David Smethurst, former head of programming at Team17.
The speed at which players can start experiencing your game can have a significant impact on engagement and retention. This initial interaction sets the tone for overall perception: If players have to wait too long, they’ll lose interest even before entering core gameplay. When it comes to matching your players quickly, Unity was intentional in its design and chose a method that reduced time to match by up to 35% of other methods.
To manage this at scale, Unity stays one step ahead of the demand curve, maintaining a buffer of servers in a warm state to ensure that they stay ready for a surge in players. This is essential to a game’s successful launch and helps ensure that when the player count blows past even the most ambitious forecasts, there are servers available for everyone.
For the Apex launch, the platform supported over 3 million peak concurrent users with an uptime SLA of 99.95%, giving Respawn the confidence that their games’ success won’t be hindered by the infrastructure powering it.