Game backends, esports platforms, companion apps and live operations tooling. We build the systems around games (accounts, matchmaking, economies, tournaments and liveops) where latency, fairness and retention are decided.
Sessions, state sync and matchmaking
Brackets, scheduling and results
Clans, rosters and social graphs
Second-screen stats, loadouts and alerts
Currencies, stores and entitlements
Events, seasons and content scheduling
Moderated communication at scale
Progression, telemetry and analytics
Regional routing: competitive play is decided in milliseconds
Server authority over anything that affects outcomes
Progression and inventory that never duplicate or vanish
Dropped players rejoin a session cleanly
A launch or event spike is the load that matters
Transactional purchases and audited currency grants
Age gating, parental controls and moderated chat
Shipping events without redeploying the client
Ranges, not quotes. Scope, integrations and compliance work move these, so the number we give you after a discovery call is the one that means something.
An accounts-and-progression MVP with basic matchmaking runs $50,000-$100,000. A full platform with realtime services, an economy and a companion app runs $100,000-$200,000. Competitive infrastructure with multi-region latency targets, anti-cheat and league management runs $200,000-$350,000+. Concurrency target is the main cost driver: a thousand simultaneous players and a hundred thousand are different architectures.
We build the systems around games rather than gameplay itself: backends, matchmaking, economies, tournament platforms, companion apps and liveops tooling. If you have a Unity or Unreal team, we are the people who make the multiplayer, accounts and monetisation work behind them. For gameplay development we would tell you to hire a studio, not us.
The foundational rule is server authority: any value that affects outcomes (score, currency, inventory, match results) is computed and stored server-side, never trusted from the client. On top of that sit rate limiting, statistical anomaly detection and replay validation. Client-side checks are a speed bump, not a defence, because the client is in the attacker's hands.
That is what the load testing phase is for. We model a realistic launch curve, test at multiples of the expected peak, and build autoscaling with queueing so that excess demand produces a wait rather than a failure. Graceful degradation matters more than raw capacity. Players tolerate a queue far better than a broken session.
Three to five months for a backend MVP, six to ten for a full platform, ten to sixteen for competitive-scale infrastructure. Load and fairness testing are not compressible phases; exploits and latency problems only surface under realistic concurrency.
Tell us what you are trying to ship and we will tell you what it takes — scope, timeline and the parts that usually go wrong.