From Homebrew Orchestration to 50k Players Overnight using Edgegap's Orchestration
Written in collaboration with
Slipstream Games
Key Highlights
From Homebrew to AAA Orchestration: Slipstream Games has written its own scaling and orchestration logic for their web game Drift.io. It was, in their words, “extremely expensive”, “led to crashes and failed connections” and users “would drop off because their ping was far too high to play.” Migrating to Edgegap “solved all three of these problems” said Sam Bunger, founder of the studio.
Easy Migration & Available Support: Switching to Edgegap took “about 3 weeks” as the integration “with the API was simple and the technical support was very helpful”.
Cost-Effective F2P Infrastructure: Slipstream Games estimates migrating to Edgegap “reduced our server costs by 50%”. Dynamic scaling capabilities help minimize operational expenses for free-to-play games where every server cost impacts profitability
Seamless Scaling: Drift.io launched the game on CrazyGames.com and saw “about 50,000 players come into our game in 24 hours. Edgegap had no problems with this sort of scale […]”
Instant Global Distribution to 615+ Locations: Edgegap instantly distributed Drift.io to the world’s largest edge network, ensuring players across all regions could access the racing game. This solved its issues of delivering an excellent online experience to “Middle East, South America, and Africa” and from a performance standpoint, reduced “P80 round trip ping from 200-250ms to 100-110ms.”
Focus on Game Development: All of this helped Slipstream to “finally delete all our deployment orchestration code, which was a massive relief” as it helped them avoid "[wasting] a lot of time we could spent elsewhere”.
Slipstream Games is a small, passionate indie studio committed to making high-impact multiplayer experiences without the bloated overhead of a massive team.
Founded by Ryan and Sam, Drift.io started in April 2021 as a weekend project and has never stopped growing in scope and success ever since. A web-based multiplayer drifting-and-racing game built to deliver slick, arcade-style thrills with modern backend infrastructure. Players join lobbies, drift through dynamic tracks, battle other cars, and unlock customizations in a gameplay loop designed for retention and social interaction. The result: a game that feels polished, secure, and competitive, without the “indie” compromises on networking or cheat-vulnerability.
The Challenge
As a smaller studio with ambitious global plans for their F2P web-based racing game, Slipstream Games faced several critical multiplayer infrastructure challenges to achieve their goals:
Small Team, Complex Infrastructure: Operating with a small but passionate team of a few people, Slipstream Games needs to manage complex multiplayer infrastructure. Initially, they chose to build it themselves. In their words:
We had also written our own logic for orchestrating game server deployments across our clusters, which as you know is a very hard problem to solve. Our implementation was flawed in various ways, which led to crashes and failed connections for our users.
Cost Optimization for F2P Model: As a free-to-play game, every cloud cost matters. The studio needed intelligent resource allocation, and flexible scaling to maximize server utilization while minimizing operational expenses. Which they struggled with, in their own words:
We had three Kubernetes clusters in the US, Europe, and Asia. Hosting them ourselves was extremely expensive, as we were paying for multiple nodes in each cluster to sit there empty waiting for peak player times.
Hosting them ourselves was extremely expensive, as we were paying for multiple nodes in each cluster to sit there empty waiting for peak player times.
Global Audience vs Limited Distribution: WebGL games are, by design, reaching players worldwide. Drift.io’s F2P model meant traditional hosting meant choosing between expensive global coverage or limiting launch regions.
We had three Kubernetes clusters in the US, Europe, and Asia. [Despite that], we had lots of new users from the Middle East, South America, and Africa who would drop off because their ping was far too high to play.
The Solution – Game Server Orchestration
Edgegap modern orchestration is built on three major foundations that help studios across 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.
Edgegap also prides itself on its easy integration and support.
All of which, combined, this had a material impact on the Drift.io online experience:
Simple Integration & Migration: Integrating with Edgegap’s API was remarkably straightforward, allowing Slipstream Games to migrate from their legacy servers to Edgegap in weeks, a process that would have taken months with traditional infrastructure. Clear documentation covered most topics and responsive technical support on Discord helped close the final gaps. For a small team that had spent countless hours building and maintaining their own orchestration tools, the speed and simplicity of this transition were a game-changer. In their words:
Integrating with the API was simple and the technical support was very helpful. This helped us get onto Edgegap and off our old servers in about 3 weeks.
That transition was insanely fast for us considering how many countless hours we spent building and maintaining our own server orchestration solution.
The documentation got us 95% percent of the way through our implementation, and the quick technical support on discord helped us with the last 5%.
Instant Global Reach: From the moment Drift.io launched, Slipstream Games could distribute their game to 615+ locations worldwide at a single price point. This eliminated the traditional cost vs. coverage dilemma, allowing the studio to reach players in previously cost-prohibitive markets like Australia and the Asia-Pacific region without budget penalties or selective regional launches.
It reduced our [...] P80 round trip ping from 200-250ms to 100-110ms.
Automated Infrastructure: The containerized platform automated critical deployment and scaling processes, dramatically reducing the technical workload on Slipstream Games's small team. Without dedicated backend developers, the studio could focus on game development while Edgegap handled the complex orchestration of their multiplayer infrastructure automatically.
Fixing every issue that arose from our poor implementation wasted a lot of time we could have spent elsewhere.
[Once we migrated] we could finally delete all our deployment orchestration code, which was a massive relief.
Global Rapid Scaling: Slipstream Games saw a surge of traffic during their launch on CrazyGames.com, reaching over 50,000 players in a single day. With Edgegap, their team had complete peace of mind as the backend automatically scaled, spinning up servers as new players joined and shutting them down as they left, ensuring optimal performance without paying for unused capacity.
We recently launched the game on CrazyGames.com and saw about 50k players come into our game in 24 hours. Edgegap had no problems with this sort of scale […].
The peace of mind that comes with knowing we can get a surge of players without worrying about scaling allows us to focus on features that are more directly player facing
Cost-Effectiveness: Once Slipstream Games migrated its entire traffic to Edgegap, it became apparent that the pricing and sum of all performance optimizations brought by Edgegap – reducing their total server costs by 50%.
“Switching to Edgegap” … “reduced our server costs by 50%
Conclusion
Edgegap's orchestration let Drift.io reach players worldwide while keeping costs optimized for what would have been an expensive type of game to operate.
Yet, the combination of global distribution, optimized performance, smart cost management, and automated updates allowed Slipstream Games's team to operate a great web-based racing game, at scale.
By solving the usual trade-offs between global reach and budget constraints, Edgegap gave Drift.io the performance racing players need and the cost-effectiveness that helps their F2P model work.
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All quotes from Sam Bunger, Founder of Slipstream Games
