A Fully Managed Solutions that Saves Time for Indies Multiplayer VR Horror
Written in collaboration with
Dirty Pearl Studios
Key Highlights
Easy Integration & Dedicated Support: Edgegap's Unreal Engine plugin enabled Dirty Pearl Studios to deploy containerized game servers with zero prior experience by simply packaging their server binaries. The team received responsive Discord support even on the free plan, with engineers open to feedback and custom integration improvements. This contrasted sharply with their previousprovider, which required expensive support plans for similar service.
Fully Managed, Automated Orchestration for Any Team & Project Size: Edgegap eliminated fleet management burdens like region availability, update deployments, and scheduling downtime. Servers automatically deployed close to developers with zero-time investment and no need for fleet deployments, scaling groups, or VM definitions. This allowed the small team to focus on game development rather than infrastructure.
Regionless Global Hosting to 615+ Locations: Edgegap's network allows on-demand deployment across 615+ locations worldwide at a single price point. The platform's patented decision-making system automatically deploys servers at the ideal location for each match to minimize latency. This solved the typical trade-off between cost and coverage that studios usually face.
Latency Reduction for Ideal VR Online Experience: VR games face unique challenges since lag can cause motion sickness, making low latency critical beyond typical gaming frustrations. Edgegap's orchestration reduces latency by 58% on average by deploying servers as close as possible to players. This is especially important given that VR headsets rely on WiFi networking rather than wired connections.
The Studio
Dirty Pearl Studios is a passionate VR developer that aims to create immersive experiences that blend cutting-edge technology with unforgettable storytelling.
Its initial upcoming release is One by One, a haunted house-inspired, immersive VR horror multiplayer game, which includes AI-driven dynamic horror moments, challenging puzzles, atmospheric environments, and most importantly, the ability to play with up to 4 friends in multiplayer.
The Challenge
As a small studio, the team at Dirty Pearl Studios needed a dedicated game server hosting and orchestration solution that, in their words, "just works". As Timothy Kennedy, studio head of Dirty Pearl Studios, says, they focus on their expertise of game development, not infrastructure which meant a fully managed solution that is easy to integrate was critical for their provider of choice:
Our staff are primarily focused on developing our game, not the infrastructure. We need to focus our time and energy towards making a great game, not worrying about fleets, scaling, regions, etc.
It's one thing to develop multiplayer, but what game developers often fail to consider is the DevOps time and resources needed to operate it. As Timothy mentions he wanted to make sure a fully managed solution that would scale and help streamline their DevOps workload:
Routing players to servers based on ping and location can be incredibly complex, especially as the player base grows.
Additionally, the service provider needed to function with Dirty Pearl's current tools and architecture:
We needed a service that would cleanly integrate with our Nakama backend and its matchmaking system.
Finally, another key consideration was that while the horror game genre isn't latency-sensitive, latency when playing in a VR headsets is a massive challenge for VR developers. As the CEO states:
VR games have to consider things that other platforms don't. Lag can literally make people sick (not just rage), so we needed a dedicated server provider that would be able to deploy servers as close as possible to our players so that they would have a good experience.
Additionally, VR headsets use WiFi for networking, which introduces further challenges with latency. This is in contrast to PC and consoles, who can connect using wires to the user's modem.
The Solution – Game Server Orchestration
Edgegap’s modern orchestration is built on three major foundations that help studios with their game server hosting:
Edgegap uses containers, which standardize the deployment of these compute workloads, solving performance consistency across online experiences and enabling game servers to be deployed in 1-3 seconds worldwide to launch games faster.
Edgegap's orchestration leverages the world's first, and largest, regionless edge network that enables game studios to deploy game servers worldwide to 615+ locations at a single price, solving both the cost and coverage issues for game studios where one (usually coverage) had to be sacrificed to optimize the other (usually cost).
Finally, Edgegap's orchestration uses a patented decision-making system to deploy game servers at the ideal location for each player in a match (usually the closest), helping improve the in-game experience with lower latency for all players by 58% on average.
Edgegap also prides itself on its easy integration and support.
Together, these elements helped convince Dirty Pearl Studios that Edgegap was the perfect fit for their 4-player COOP game One by One.
Easy Integration: Despite zero experience with container-based game servers in Unreal Engine, Edgegap "from day one was super helpful in getting our servers up and running." As Timothy mentions, "It was incredible that all we had to do was package our server binaries and their Unreal Engine plugin did the rest." This allowed the developers to focus time back on game development, not infrastructure and integration.
Support & Insights: Edgegap was supportive throughout the process and "answered all our questions and gave support in Discord [...] even before we were a paying customer and still on the free plan." This is in stark contrast with their former provider with whom they "had to purchase an expensive support plan to get the same level of service that Edgegap provided." This level of support and Edgegap's openness to improve impressed the team at Dirty Pearl Studios, as they said "I have not seen such open-minded engineers from a service partner in a long time."
Automated & Fully Managed Game Server Orchestration that Saves Time & Money: The team has experience with taking on "burden of fleet management and all of the headaches that come with it like region availability, deploying updates to servers, scheduling downtime, etc.". Edgegap's platform automation and fully managed orchestration "totally delivered on this - servers were popping up close to wherever our devs were located with zero-time investment on our end. No fleet deployments, no scaling groups, no VM definitions, just single servers when and where we wanted them."
Ideal Server Locations Deployed across 615+ Locations for 58% Lower Latency on Average: Edgegap's first, and largest, regionless network allows Dirty Pearl Studios to deploy their game server to 615+ locations worldwide at a single price point, on-demand. Alongside Edgegap's patented decision-making orchestration, which deploys game servers at the ideal location to minimize latency, this helped the studio deliver as latency-free an online experience as possible. This is proved by its ability to reduce latency by 58% on average.
Integration with Nakama: Dirty Pearl decided to use Heroic Labs' Nakama as its online service solution, including accounts management, matchmaking and more. Thanks to Edgegap's dedicated integration for Nakama, the integration process was simple. Even when they bumped into integration challenges (as any integration does), Edgegap was ever present and "helped us with issues they could have legitimately pointed us back to Nakama for support but they never did." Edgegap was also willing to improve, as they state "when I had questions and some suggestions on changes they were super open to it and worked with us to integrate changes I had made to our local deployment into the plugin [...] so that others could benefit from them."
Conclusion
By removing the time-consuming complexity of server orchestration, eliminating geographic trade-offs, and providing truly responsive support, Edgegap allowed the team to make the game, not infrastructure. Despite using another provider initially, it convinced Dirty Pearl Studios to switch to Edgegap. As Timothy Kennedy says:
Overall, we're extremely happy with our decision to go with Edgegap.
We initially were using a different dedicated server provider and even had scaffolded the infrastructure needed to make it work, but the pricing, ease of getting servers up and the incredible support from the Edgegap team convinced us to switch.
