The Studio

Founded by military veterans in 2022, Combat Waffle Studios assembled globe-spanning developers to build multiple games including its tentpole blockbuster – Ghosts of Tabor.

An authentic and challenging VR survival extraction shooter that took, and keeps, the world by storm – reaching the #1 best-sellers list of every dedicated VR category including META's Quest Store and most recently, Sony's PlayStation Network.

Beyond sales, Ghosts of Tabor players have (as of writing) fired 5 billion shots, suffered 152M player deaths and completed nearly 30 million total raids. In other words, it is a juggernaut in the VR space.

The Challenge

Authenticity and intensity breed passion – and you would only scratch the surface level of the dedication of Ghosts of Tabor's fanbase. As Ghosts of Tabor fans demand authentic VR gameplay, which extends to every facet of the game – including their matchmaking and game server hosting, which extends well outside of Combat Waffle’s control as developers.

Jonas Degn, CTO at Combat Waffle, sought to improve their online experience and solve challenges:

• DevOps Workload: Extraction shooters "reboot" their players' statistics multiple times a year (three times a year in Combat Waffle’s case), which severely impacts the availability of internal development resources between these “resets,” alongside patches and content releases. Reducing DevOps workload with managing game servers is the primary goal for any orchestration solution.

• Coverage - Scaling: In extraction shooters, majority of players join multiple servers in the timespan of a single game session duration. For example, a player may die 5 minutes into a game and join the next game (and repeat multiple times) before the first match has finished and the initial game server is ready to shut down. To deliver optimal player experience, orchestration requires a fine balance of reusing available hardware capacity and personalized server location choice for each individual match.

• Coverage – Locations: Ghosts of Tabor's userbase is primarily based in the United States, but Combat Waffle remains committed to an excellent online experience worldwide. Hosting cost in locations like Australia and Japan are highly prohibitive, leading developers to concentrate hosting to locations such as Singapore. Highly centralized hosting often results in increased latency, higher packet drop rate, and overreliance on single point of failure. Far from ideal when aiming for a consistent performance worldwide.

• Cost: The game's initial game server hosting architecture mixed bare metal and cloud scaling. While bare metal helped reduce egress cost and minimize the financial impact of unoptimized game server usage, scaling bare metal infrastructure was cost prohibitive, due to the inability to fraction vCPU usage with providers.

• Support: Combat Waffle needed a partner who was very present and available to help their development team, given the live ops nature of the game. Waiting weeks on end for answers was out of the question.

Given the challenges listed above, Jonas was hesitant – how could Edgegap solve such complex challenges with their regionless hosting orchestration?

The Solution – Game Server Orchestration

Edgegap orchestration is built on three major technologies that help studios with game server hosting:

1. Containers standardize deployment of compute workloads. Containerization solves worldwide compatibility requirements (i.e. not having to worry about the server's hardware) and burst scaling, allowing server deployment in 1-3 seconds worldwide with advanced caching strategies.

2. The world's first, and largest, regionless edge network enables game studios to deploy servers worldwide to 615+ locations at a single price. Unified pricing delivers both cost efficiency and global hosting coverage, without sacrificing one (usually coverage) to optimize the other (usually cost).

3. Patented decision-making system to deploy game servers in the ideal location for a matched group of players. This helps improve the in-game experience with lower latency for all players.

Combined, this had a material impact on the Ghost of Tabor online experience.

• Ease of Integration: The Combat Waffle team was able to get their game server running (in a testing environment) in a matter of days, despite the DevOps complexity added by live traffic of a released game.

• Fully Managed Orchestration: Simplified Combat Waffle’s development process by automating the game server and orchestration management, reducing time needed to scale, and to prepare releases.

• Global Rapid Scaling: In addition to the usual problem of efficient scaling up, Combat Waffle requires closing game servers faster (as games end) to reduce cost of idle compute. Edgegap's just-in-time container deployment with highly optimized orchestration helped both start up, and more importantly to scale down, game servers faster than ever to ultimately reduce cost.

• Regionless Hosting in 615 Locations Worldwide: Moving from five server regions to 615+ locations globally, on-demand and just-in-time, helped Combat Waffle improve players’ in-game experience through reduced latency by deploying closer to users, and ensured a much more consistently excellent experience for players outside game's primary demographics (regions).

• Predictable Usage-Based Pricing: Edgegap’s single price point worldwide helps Combat waffle confidently track and predict its cloud hosting costs regardless of the location of their servers.  Edgegap’s enterprise plan, alongside fractional vCPU billing, and rapid scaling up/down with player count, all added to Combat Waffle’s optimized cloud cost without manual input. No need to tediously rebalance bare metal orders monthly to minimize their hosting costs.

• 24/7 Support & Direct Development Input from Devs: Thousands of messages and daily discussions on every aspect of multiplayer helped secure ongoing support and improvements to Ghost of Tabor’s online experience, despite the technical lead living a full 12-hour time difference from Edgegap’s office.

Conclusion

Edgegap’s partnership with Combat Waffle demonstrates the transformative impact that regionless orchestration, intelligent server deployment, and hands-on collaboration can have on a fast-growing live service game.

By delivering massive global coverage at a single price, materially reducing hosting cost, improving latency worldwide, and integrating seamlessly into complex pre-existing live infrastructure, Edgegap helped Ghosts of Tabor scale confidently while maintaining an exceptional online experience for their players. When challenges arose, rapid response, transparent communication, and continuous product improvements strengthened the partnership and elevated the overall result.

Ultimately, this collaboration shows how the right technology, paired with an invested and reliable partner, can meaningfully advance both player experience and studio efficiency.

Or in short, as Jonas Degn CTO at Combat Waffle, said:

 “[Edgegap is] the good kind of software where you don’t have to think about it because it just works.”