The Studio 

The Isle is a gritty, open-world survival horror game where players explore vast landscapes of dense forest and open plains, traverse treacherous mountains and wade through dark swamps where horrors lurk with  only one goal: survive.

Developed by The Isle Development Team since 2014 and published by Afterthough LLC, the game engages players the ability to become either predator or prey on servers featuring up to 100+ players.

The Challenge 

The Isle has a highly dedicated, massive and global audience that has engaged with the game for nearly a decade. With its current provider, The Isle faced performance issues with its community servers, which resulted in player backlash. As Don Wittich, founder and director of The Isle says:

The Isle has a globally distributed player base, and with our previous infrastructure, players outside our core regions were experiencing higher ping, desync, and inconsistent game quality.

This was leading to player frustration and made it harder for us to deliver a consistent multiplayer experience worldwide.

This is despite the team’s heavy involvement in operating its fleet of persistent servers. Which drained away time and development resources away from game development itself:

Managing server deployments, scaling, and region selection manually was time-consuming for the team.

It required constant tuning, added operational risk during updates or traffic spikes, and pulled engineering resources away from core gameplay and stability improvements.

Yet, despite the excellent efforts of their team, scaling their fleet of persistent servers remained guesswork. Creating discrepancy in availability of servers, and critically for the team, wasted capacity with a concrete financial impact.

Player concurrency fluctuates significantly depending on updates, events, and time zones.

Our previous setup made it difficult to spin up servers exactly where and when they were needed, which sometimes resulted in underutilized servers in some regions and overloaded ones in others. 

The Solution – Game Server Orchestration 

Edgegap’s modern orchestration leverages the world’s first, and largest, edge network. It includes the ability to automatically deploy game servers to a regionless cloud network of 615+ locations worldwide, just-in-time and on-demand based on player traffic.

For games with persistent servers like MMOs, including The Isle, Edgegap also offers the ability to deploy to a fully managed “Private Fleet” of servers with custom hardware including Bare Metal and Virtual Machines (“VMs”).

This private pool of servers makes it easy and cost-effective to operate persistent servers for MMOs (and social games) and ensures low-latency performance to players. Key features include:

• Self-serve access to fully managed persistent servers with custom hardware locations worldwide removing Egress costs,

• Automated orchestration and server management,

• Enterprise-grade reliability alongside DDoS Protection,

• Hot stand-by and,

• Monitoring, analytics, and proactive alerts.

This ability for The Isle to deploy to a fleet of persistent servers in a fully managed private pool allowed the development team to “deploy servers closer to players [which] dramatically improving latency and session stability without requiring us to manually manage regions or infrastructure” as Don Wittich says.

Concretely, Edgegap’s platform and its support team helped The Isle:

• Easy Integration & Seamless Migration: Edgegap offers simple and clear documentation, access to API references, alongside the tools and blueprint any Unreal engine project needs to integrate Edgegap’s game server orchestration. As they said, "[w]e especially appreciated how straightforward the migration process was and how well Edgegap integrated into our existing backend workflow.”

• Improved Player’s Experience through Lower Latency: Edgegap's server deployments significantly enhanced distribution, improving players’ online experience worldwide. As they mention, “[Edgegap helped] reduce latency globally by dynamically placing servers at the optimal edge location for each session”

• Save DevOps time with Automated Orchestration: The platform's automated scaling capabilities eliminated manual infrastructure management and ensured resources matched demand. As stated by the team, the Edgegap platform “eliminates manual region management, letting our team focus on development instead of infrastructure.”

• Instantly Scale & Deliver Capacity to Ensure an Ideal Player Experience Worldwide: The platform's automated scaling capabilities eliminated manual infrastructure management and ensured resources matched demand. As stated by the team, “[Edgegap’s platform] scales effortlessly with player demand, ensuring capacity was available when and where it was needed.”

Conclusion 

By removing the time-consuming complexity of server orchestration, Edgegap allowed the team to focus on making the game, not infrastructure. Additionally, by eliminating geographic trade-offs and providing a hosting solution that truly impacts the end user’s experience for the better, helped the team deliver an even better online experience than ever. As Don Wittich, founder and director of The Isle says:

What stood out most was Edgegap’s global edge deployment model and how it directly translated into a better player experience.  The platform removed a lot of guesswork and manual overhead from multiplayer server hosting.

Combined with responsive support and clear tooling, Edgegap has become a key part of how we deliver a smooth multiplayer experience for The Isle.