The Studio

Meltdown Interactive Media is an Auckland, New Zealand-based indie studio with a passion for cross-platform racing games. Led by developer Greg Quinn, the studio is currently developing Block Trucks Multiplayer Racing, a competitive, real-time, ranked multiplayer racing game where players race across a variety of challenging track surfaces, upgrading their trucks and climbing the ranks as they rack up wins.

With Block Trucks, Greg set out to deliver a polished, competitive multiplayer experience that demands reliable dedicated servers and smooth matchmaking, all while navigating the realities of indie development on a lean budget.

The Challenge

Block Trucks Multiplayer Racing required two things that are notoriously difficult and expensive to get right: scalable dedicated servers and reliable matchmaking. For an indie developer building a game in alpha, both presented a serious challenge.

Affordable game servers that can scale: Traditional server hosting models charge for always-on or pre-warmed instances, whether players show up or not. As Greg explains:

"I didn't want to have to pay for always on or warmed up game server instances, as an indie developer, especially while the game is in alpha. I was also looking for a solution that could automatically scale without having to get into complex configurations and fleet management."

Matchmaking without the complexity: When Greg turned to OpenMatch as a potential matchmaking solution, the documentation alone was enough to stop the project cold:

"Reading the OpenMatch documentation made my head explode, and seemed like a very complex topic with a lot of places where things could go wrong. Integration and understanding of the platform would have taken a long time."

Together, these two challenges represented a real threat to the project's momentum: budget drained by idle infrastructure, and development time sunk into backend systems rather than the game itself.

The Solution

Game Server Orchestration

After exploring its options, Meltdown Interactive Media found Edgegap, a platform built specifically to remove the infrastructure burden from game developers of all sizes.

Edgegap's modern orchestration leverages the world's first and largest regionless edge network, enabling game studios to deploy game servers worldwide to 615+ locations at a single price. Its containerized approach standardizes deployment, solving performance consistency and enabling servers to spin up in 1-3 seconds worldwide. A patented decision-making system then selects the optimal server location for each match, reducing latency for every player.

For Block Trucks Multiplayer Racing, the impact was immediate:

• Just-In-Time, Usage-Based Pricing: Edgegap only charges for game server containers that are actually running. As Greg noted, this "optimised our server spending" in a direct and meaningful way, with no idle capacity and no wasted budget. For a game in alpha where traffic is unpredictable, this model made dedicated servers financially viable from day one.

• Automated Scaling, Zero Configuration Overhead: Rather than managing fleet configurations or scaling logic, Greg could rely on Edgegap's platform to handle everything automatically. As he put it, "Edgegap completely abstracts the game server scaling away from the developer, making our lives easier." Servers spin up when players join and wind down when they leave, with no complex infrastructure decisions required on the developer's side.

• A Platform That Treats Indies as Equals: One of the qualities Greg highlighted most was how Edgegap approaches its indie developers. "They treat small indie developers with the same care and focus as even larger developers," he noted. Whether through direct Discord support or responsive turnaround times, the team at Edgegap ensured Greg had everything he needed to move forward with confidence.

Matchmaking

Matchmaking, while separate from game server hosting, is central to players' experience and critical to keeping development time focused on the game itself.

Edgegap's fully managed implementation of OpenMatch gave Greg a clear path forward where there previously wasn't one. Rather than spending weeks working through complex documentation and server configuration, the platform abstracted away the hard parts entirely. As Greg explains:

"Leveraging Edgegap's implementation of OpenMatch, we were able to get matchmaking setup in a few hours, without having to worry about any major server configuration or scaling."

What had looked like a weeks-long integration effort became an afternoon's work, freeing Greg to direct his attention back to the game.

Conclusion

For the team at Meltdown Interactive Media, the math on multiplayer infrastructure is unforgiving: every hour spent on backend systems is an hour not spent on the game, and every dollar spent on idle servers is a dollar not spent on development. Edgegap solved both equations.

By offering usage-based pricing that only charges for active containers, and by wrapping OpenMatch's complexity inside a managed, developer-friendly system, Edgegap gave Block Trucks Multiplayer Racing the foundation it needed to grow, without demanding the time, expertise, or budget of a full backend team.

As Greg puts it: "I like Edgegap because they treat small indie developers with the same care and focus as even larger developers. I've always been looked after in their Discord and support times and turnaround has always been excellent."

With its infrastructure sorted, Meltdown Interactive Media can focus on what matters most: delivering the competitive, cross-platform racing experience its players are waiting for.