Does Your Gaming Infrastructure Strategy Need a Level Up?

Key takeaway

• Many workloads involved in supporting today’s live service games don’t require on-demand elasticity, but organizations are paying for it anyway.
• The Hivelocity Gaming Bundle provides three purpose-tiers that can be used to rehome workloads to reliable, cost-efficient bare-metal infrastructure.  
• Hivelocity enables studios and developers to stay focused on delivering amazing gaming experiences, not managing infrastructure. 

Live service games require a host of workloads, from account services to leaderboards to the game servers themselves. To support these needs, public cloud resources have traditionally played a key role in game infrastructure, where they can be leveraged for burst capacity, GPU-heavy workloads, and flexible development.

However, like the shifting meta-strategy in competitive multiplayer games, that cloud-by-default belief is now changing.

The reality is that many of the systems behind a live service don’t truly require burst capabilities. Elements such as match servers, account services, leaderboards, telemetry, matchmaking, and commerce systems run around the clock with fairly predictable demand. And when those workloads sit on infrastructure priced for hyperscale-grade elasticity, many studios end up paying a premium for flexibility that’s not actually needed. As a result, teams tasked with simultaneously controlling costs and ensuring an outstanding player experience are beginning to consider other options.

Introducing the Hivelocity Gaming Bundle

Hivelocity offers bare-metal infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that provides a compelling alternative to hyperscale cloud for the core workloads that enable service experiences.

Our Gaming Bundle gives studios and game-server platforms a dedicated infrastructure option for the parts of the stack that need to stay on, supported by enhanced economics, single-tenant performance, regional placement near player populations, and cloud automation tools that fit modern platform operations. Our three purpose-built tiering options provide an ideal home for your workloads, whether they’re part of the development environment, game-adjacent services, or the latency-sensitive game servers themselves.

By taking advantage of the bundle, your organization can gain:

• Predictable costs: Monthly dedicated infrastructure for workloads that run all day, every day.
• Consistent performance: Single-tenant hardware for game services that cannot afford variance.
• Operational control: Portal, API, and infrastructure as code workflows for platform teams.


Three Tiers to Optimize Your Workload Alignment

It’s important to keep in mind that Hivelocity is not a replacement for public cloud. Instead, think of our offering as a better fit for your always-on, latency-sensitive, and cost-heavy workloads that need dedicated infrastructure.

Tier 1, or Engineering Compute, allows you to build, develop, and ship games without paying burst rates for sustained load. It’s a dedicated environment for engineering and asset teams, where your team gains faster, more predictable build and CI cycles on dedicated cores while paying a flat monthly cost instead of a burst-priced build bill. Hybrid capabilities mean you can easily scale into your own cloud environment as needed during peak periods.

Tier 2, Production Compute, provides a home for your steady-state game services. Think reliable, single-tenant infrastructure for always-on services. Costs are predictable. Dedicated cores remove the noisy-neighbor and 99th percentile latency variance issues that can be caused by shared infrastructure. Our PCI-validated facility foundation in Tampa is available for applicable commerce workflows, with footprint expansion already underway.

Finally, Tier 3, Live Service Compute, supports your latency-critical core, where consistent infrastructure directly benefits the player experience. Here, your game runs on single-tenant hardware with no hypervisor layer unless you choose to add one (Proxmox is a popular option and is available in our store), world-state persistence that completes writes without interrupting play, and regional placement near concentrated player populations.


Focus On Your Game, Not Your Infrastructure

Your team’s time should be spent on delivering outstanding experiences to your players, not managing infrastructure minutiae. But you can’t sacrifice control, either.

That’s why our model gives you total ownership of the game-specific layers—such as matchmaking, fleet orchestration, anti-cheat operations, application security, game logic, and live service operations—while we handle the infrastructure.

As an example, Hivelocity hosts the bare metal on which your anti-cheat agents run, but we do not operate anti-cheat as a service. Working with us, you maintain complete control of matchmaking and game logic, fleet orchestration and deployment rules, application security, and other critical concerns.

Press Start on Optimized Infrastructure Efficiency Today

If you’re ready to achieve enhanced infrastructure and workload alignment, the first critical determination is which workloads sit on the latency-critical path, which run in steady state in the production fabric, and which are build and engineering loads. The answer selects the bundle tiering.

Our team is ready to help you get started.

Get in touch today to take the next step.

FAQ

Q: Will we lose control over our critical systems? 
A: No. Hivelocity manages the infrastructure; your team remains in control of all your services, including matchmaking, account services, game servers, anti-cheat, and all the other essential elements of a live service game. 

Q: Can we keep our familiar operating model as we move away from cloud? 
A: Hivelocity offers a IaC and API-driven provisioning that enable a cloud-like experience when working with our bare-metal infrastructure. This allows teams to keep working the way they’re used to while gaining the benefits of dedicated hardware.