The Studio

Sweden-based Starbreeze Studios, renowned developer and publisher, is best known for its action-packed cooperative multiplayer game series PAYDAY.

The latest installment, PAYDAY 3, expands on the high-stakes heists and intense shootouts that have made the franchise a fan favorite. Set several years after the events of PAYDAY 2, the game follows the original crew as they navigate a new criminal underworld in New York City. Key features include a revamped AI system for enemies, improved heist mechanics, and enhanced character customization.

PAYDAY 3's core gameplay experience received positive reviews, praised for its intense moment-to-moment gunplay, inventive level design, and enjoyable cooperative multiplayer experience. The game successfully captured the essence of the franchise, delivering another thrilling cooperative experience to fans. However, its infrastructure struggled to keep up with the game's popularity.

The Challenge

While exploring its options for game server hosting, Starbreeze assessed various alternatives, including Edgegap, to find a suitable replacement. The evaluation process considered key factors such as overall end user (“players”) experience, product quality, scalability, integration time and resources and costs.

The most critical challenge, however, was ensuring a seamless transition with minimal downtime, as to  maintain player engagement and preventing any disruption to the gaming experience.

The Solution

Edgegap's robust and simple-to-integrate solution facilitated Starbreeze's seamless and rapid migration. Upon deployment, Starbreeze immediately improved the online experience for its players, and made significant cost reductions to its cloud hosting expense.

Edgegap's platform proved an ideal match for PAYDAY 3, leveraging the game's Unreal Engine compatibility with container instances (Docker). This enabled Starbreeze to effortlessly containerize and deploy game servers worldwide to Edgegap’s edge network.

Edgegap's patented orchestrator harnesses the world's largest edge network, built by Edgegap and tailored for multiplayer games, to strategically positioning servers closest to players as to minimize latency and enhance fairness. An exceptional level of performance that is only Edgegap's platform is capable of.

• Integration: Starbreeze's backend developers were able to integrate Edgegap in days, saving hundreds of days of labor compared to traditional orchestration services.

• Scaling: Edgegap deploys game server just-in-time, on-demand, and scales up to 40 deployments per second sustained for 60 minutes. This allows Starbreeze to go from 0 to hundreds of thousands of deployments, giving the team the peace of mind to scale without issues – from new content (DLC) rollout or to meet a massive growth of the game’s player base for the game’s participation PlayStation Plus Monthly Game subscription program. Edgegap ensures their game remains up 24/7, regardless of traffic.

• Player Experience: Latency is the number one reason for player churn in multiplayer games. This is particularly critical when the core experience of a game is tight collaboration in highly intense shootouts. Edgegap’s automated game server orchestration taps into 615+ locations to deploy to the ideal location every time. This ensures optimal latency for players worldwide, regardless of their location, through proximity hosting.

• Regionless Hosting: Edgegap caches game servers to all of its 615+ locations worldwide, and on on-demand deploys them to Starbreeze's global player base. This ensures an uncompromised online experience by avoiding locking servers to a select few regions that will provide a poor experience to underserved markets.

• Pricing: Edgegap's no-commitment hosting helped Starbreeze align their resource and cash flow usage with the game's growing popularity without overspending, thanks to the platform's pay-per-use hosting model that is entirely in-sync with player demand.

• Support: Every game’s infrastructure and networking is unique and Edgegap's development team was an ever-present resource during the integration process, guiding Starbreeze's team and optimizing their game server performance to minimize compute and egress usage. This collaboration continues, providing insights and fixes to support Starbreeze well past integration as Starbreeze continues to develop the game, including crash reporting tools and the ability to create a player proxy to securely send API requests.

  Resiliency: PAYDAY 3’s players have enjoyed a stable experience free of server outages thanks to Edgegap's automated multi-cloud management.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Edgegap's comprehensive solution has proven to be a valuable asset for Starbreeze, providing a high-performance orchestration platform for its game server infrastructure that delivers improved player experience, rapid-scaling ability, yet remains cost-effective. By leveraging Edgegap's automated orchestration, global regionless network, and robust support, Starbreeze has been able to deliver an unparalleled gaming experience to their players worldwide.