Between the dual launch of both Palworld, with over 8 million Steam copies sold, and Enshrouded, the availability of game servers has significantly been affected. Early statistics between the two games show there have been nearly 200,000 player-created servers created in the last 7 days globally. This explosive growth has created significant delays with scalability for many server hosting providers and data centers alike.
How Nodecraft scaled to meet demand
The first time we experienced a major player-owned server event on such a scale, occurred alongside the launch of Valheim. Our team learned so much about what it means to scale and launch a growing multiplayer title at such a rapid growth rate.
Nodecraft has focused on fostering strong partnerships with data center providers such as Servers.com and Datapacket, to deploy servers at scale to over 27 data centers and growing. That means today, we're able to better meet burst server needs in cases of an unexpected runaway success game. Combined with Nodecraft's proprietary cloud technologies, we can maintain and redistribute customers to ensure performance and stability remain a constant for all server owners on the platform. Nodecraft combines these with an inventory strategy that gives our team the ability to deploy thousands of game servers at scale.
One problem that still becomes an issue, is that scale doesn't always occur at every datacenter location, which still happens even at large corporate cloud providers. We rely on anchor locations for major regions to cover most players. It quickly became an issue of making sure customers know where they could deploy servers near them.
Introducing: Location Availability
We originally planned to launch an improved location picker with availably into the upcoming Nodepanel 3 launch, but between these large launches and the upcoming Day of Dragons update, we knew we had to backport the feature to Nodepanel 2. When creating a game server at Nodecraft, we will now provide both inventory levels for locations shown and a recommendation that includes a location with inventory available.
What does this map mean?
You might be asking, what do these healthbar style icons represent? Well, we can't give away all our secrets. So, while we don't provide exact platform capacity of what these represent, to protect platform security, we can tell you it represents a combination of region capacity and largest deployable server availability. For a quick reference you can read the graph below:
In a future blog post we'll talk more about platform scalability for large game releases and how Nodecraft can provide studios with launches at this scale.