Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games are expansive, interactive worlds that host thousands of players simultaneously. To make this happen, developers must structure the architecture of the underlying network infrastructure in a way that is optimized to minimize costs while being robust enough to scale and remain accessible to all players. Even veterans of the genre, like Final Fantasy, sometimes struggle with this feat.

When an MMO game rapidly gains popularity, the surge in player numbers can place tremendous stress on its existing infrastructure.

How Does Traditional MMO Server Infrastructure Work?

First, let’s define how MMO server infrastructure works. Historically, MMOs have relied on bare-metal servers to handle player loads. Specifically, persistent instances are deployed on bare-metal servers running 24/7 across multiple global locations. While these servers offer predictable performance and full control over hardware, they present significant challenges:

• Scalability: As demand grows, procuring, setting up, and maintaining new servers is slow and cumbersome. This requires dedicated resources within the development team to manually add and optimize server capacity based on available data.

• Flexibility: Adapting to fluctuating player numbers is difficult, often resulting in underutilized resources or capacity shortfalls. "Wasted capacity" occurs when developers are charged for server resources they aren’t using, effectively throwing money out the window.

• High Operating Costs: Maintaining bare-metal infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive at low traffic levels. Savings achieved by getting a “cheaper server” running baremetal, is lost as it requires a team of dedicated engineers and DevOps specialists to manage deployments, oversee infrastructure health, and ensure optimization.

The Cloud Solution for MMOs

Cloud technology offers virtualized computing resources over the internet, providing scalability, flexibility, and often cost-effectiveness. Advantages include:

• Elasticity: Cloud services can be scaled up or down rapidly based on demand.

• Global Reach: Data centers worldwide enable low-latency experiences for global player bases.

• Managed Services: Developers can leverage managed databases, AI services, and more to enhance game features with less infrastructure management overhead.

However, while the cloud offers many advantages over traditional bare-metal infrastructure, challenges such as latency from centralized infrastructure, hardware requirements, cost management, and the complexity of traditional orchestration solutions remain.

Edgegap's Smart Fleet Manager: A Game-Changer for MMO Scalability

Edgegap's Smart Fleet Manager is a container-based game server orchestration solution designed to address these challenges effectively. In short, the fleet manager ensures the optimal deployment of persistent instances.

Key Benefits Include:

• Automated Orchestration: Smart Fleets automatically optimize fleet locations to minimize infrastructure usage, deploying game servers just-in-time to meet player demand based on historical and up-to-the-minute telemetry data. This optimization is fully managed, ensuring the ideal number of server deployment with no manual input or oversight by a game developer. Allow studios to utilize this time from their developers toward improving the game itself, not its infrastructure.

• Global Reach: With over 615 locations worldwide, Edgegap ensures that players are connected to the server closest to them, enhancing the gaming experience. Concretely, this approach of deploying nearest users reduces latency by up to 58% on average compared to traditional public cloud.

• Rapid Scaling: Designed to handle up to 14 million concurrent users (CCU) in just 60 minutes, Edgegap's platform can scale seamlessly to meet the demands of rapidly growing MMOs as it orchestrates on the world’s largest edge network tailored for multiplayer game, as it utilizes (as of 2025) 17 global and regional providers.

• Cost Efficiency: By leveraging a multi-cloud infrastructure with highly optimized orchestration and use of co-tenancy, Edgegap offers a the most cost-effective solution that adapts is adaptable to the specific needs of the each MMO game, avoiding the high operating costs associated with traditional bare metal servers.

• Engine-Agnostic: As a container-based orchestration solution, Edgegap works regardless of engine, from Unity (plugin on GitHub) to Unreal (plugin on GitHub) to an internally developed, custom engine.

Sharding & Distributed infrastructure

Creating a multiplayer MMO that spans the globe presents several technical challenges, especially when it comes to managing game shards.

Sharding involves dividing the player base into multiple instances or "shards" of the game world, each with its own server infrastructure. The difficulty lies in balancing the load across these shards while ensuring smooth performance and low latency for players from various regions. Handling this requires sophisticated server architecture that can dynamically scale, with regions often needing separate server instances to reduce lag. Players from different geographical locations might experience vastly different connection speeds, so developers must optimize data routing, server proximity, and load balancing to provide a seamless experience.

Additionally, coordinating global events or maintaining consistency across shards—while preventing issues like players being in two places at once or having fragmented progression—requires complex backend systems to sync data without sacrificing performance. The constant challenge is ensuring all players feel equally engaged, regardless of their location, which demands meticulous planning of server infrastructure, region-specific data centers, and reliable communication between shards.

These lag and latency issues can be significantly reduced with the use of infrastructure solutions like Edgegap, which allows game servers to be hosted in multiple regions around the world.

By strategically placing servers closer to players, Edgegap minimizes the distance data must travel, reducing latency and ensuring smoother gameplay. This distributed approach enables real-time server scaling based on player demand, ensuring that players from diverse locations experience a more consistent and responsive gaming environment.

With Edgegap’s global infrastructure, MMOs can deliver a more immersive experience, overcoming the challenges of managing shards and maintaining performance across a worldwide player base.

Case Study: Alderon Games' Path of Titans

Alderon Games, developers of the MMO Path of Titans, utilized Edgegap's platform to manage their server infrastructure. Their game required servers with high CPU performance (4 GHz and above) to support their popular cross-platform MMO gameplay, which features a large (8x8 km) map filled with complex AI creatures and up to 200 players.

Edgegap's orchestration of a custom pool of game servers across multiple global providers ensured a seamless and responsive experience for their players.

Conclusion

Scaling an MMO game requires a robust, flexible, and cost-effective infrastructure. Edgegap's Smart Fleet Manager offers a comprehensive solution to the unique challenges of MMO scalability, ensuring a high-quality experience for players worldwide while helping developers manage server-related costs.

While game server orchestration is critical for player experience and cost management, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Developers must also consider other key network architecture components, including netcode for data transfer and synchronization, matchmaking to manage player queues and backfills, and zoning/sharding for different game modes (e.g., PvP, PvE, or shared persistent instances).