Building Multiplayer? Apply for a Free Infrastructure Audit From PingCore

Multiplayer can transform a game. It can also introduce an entirely new set of technical and commercial questions.

Where should your servers run? How many will you need? What should happen when nobody is playing? How quickly can capacity grow if a streamer or successful launch sends far more players than expected? Should sessions be player-hosted or run on dedicated servers? What will the infrastructure actually cost?

For a small studio, these decisions can be difficult to make while also building the game itself. You may not have a dedicated infrastructure team, and you may not yet have enough player data to produce confident forecasts.

That is why PingCore is inviting indie studios to apply for a free multiplayer infrastructure audit.

Whether multiplayer is still an idea, already working in a prototype or running in production, our team will review what you have, discuss what you are likely to need and help you identify the practical next steps.

You do not need to have everything figured out

The audit is for studios at different stages of development.

You might be planning your first multiplayer game and have no infrastructure in place. You might have a working prototype running from somebody's development machine. You may already be using dedicated servers but feel unsure about cost, capacity or the route to launch.

All of those are useful starting points.

You do not need a finished architecture diagram, a detailed concurrency forecast or a complete production build. We can begin with the game you are making, how players will interact and what you already know about its technical requirements.

The earlier these questions are discussed, the more options a studio normally has. Decisions about authority, session state, persistence, matchmaking and hosting become harder to change once they are embedded throughout the game.

What the free audit can cover

Every game is different, so the conversation will be shaped around your project. Areas we can explore include:

Your multiplayer model

We will look at how players connect and what kind of sessions you are creating. That could mean competitive matches, small co-op groups, persistent survival worlds, community servers or another model entirely.

This helps establish whether you need dedicated servers, player-hosted sessions or a mixture of approaches, as well as where authority and important game state should live.

Game-server requirements

We can help you think through the resources and configuration needed to run your server build, including operating system, CPU, memory, storage, network ports and persistence.

If you already have a server build, we can review the current setup and identify assumptions that should be tested before launch. If you do not, we can help define what the infrastructure will eventually need from it.

Regions and player location

Adding more locations can reduce latency, but every region also adds capacity decisions and operational complexity.

We will discuss where your initial audience is likely to be, which locations make sense at launch and when expanding into another region becomes worthwhile. The goal is not to deploy everywhere immediately. It is to choose locations that reflect the players you realistically expect to serve.

Scaling up and down

Launch demand is rarely predictable, particularly for an indie game that might receive sudden attention from a creator, festival or platform feature.

We can explore how many servers should remain available, which signals should cause capacity to increase and how unused servers can be scaled down safely. That includes the balance between keeping warm capacity ready for players and avoiding the cost of idle infrastructure.

For persistent games, scaling down also requires care. A game-server process may be temporary, but player worlds and save data cannot be treated as disposable.

Infrastructure costs

Game-server cost is not determined by concurrent players alone. Match size, session length, resource requirements, regional distribution, bandwidth, persistent storage and idle capacity all affect the result.

We will help you understand the main cost drivers in your design and build a more useful way to estimate them. Even if exact player numbers are not yet available, comparing sensible baseline, high-demand and breakout scenarios can reveal where the largest risks sit.

Deployment and operations

Launching a server is only the beginning. Studios also need to consider updates, health checks, monitoring, crash recovery, access control and what happens when a deployment goes wrong.

The audit can help identify which operational capabilities you need for testing, Early Access and full release, without treating every future requirement as something that must be built immediately.

What you should get from the conversation

The purpose of the audit is to give your team a clearer infrastructure direction.

By the end of the discussion, you should better understand:

The hosting model that fits your game.
The technical information you still need to measure or test.
The locations that make sense for your likely audience.
How your server fleet could respond to changing demand.
The factors most likely to influence cost.
The infrastructure risks worth addressing before launch.
Which capabilities you need now and which can wait.

For some teams, the most useful outcome may be confirmation that a simple setup is enough. For others, the audit may reveal that persistence, scaling or regional deployment needs to be considered earlier than expected.

Either result is valuable. Infrastructure should match the game and the studio behind it, not an imagined version of what a multiplayer backend is supposed to look like.

Why PingCore is offering this

PingCore is built specifically for multiplayer game infrastructure. The platform supports stateful game-server containers, automatic fleet scaling, health monitoring, multi-region deployment and API-driven server management.

We also work with usage-based infrastructure, where capacity can scale up as demand grows and scale down when servers are no longer needed. For smaller studios, that can make the difference between planning for success and paying permanently for the largest success scenario they can imagine.

But useful infrastructure starts before deployment. It starts with understanding the sessions, players, data and operational reality of the game.

This audit is an opportunity to have that conversation with a team that works on game-server infrastructure every day.

Who should apply?

We would especially like to hear from:

Indie studios building their first multiplayer title.
Teams adding co-op or competitive multiplayer to an existing game.
Studios preparing a prototype, playtest, Early Access launch or full release.
Developers uncertain about dedicated servers, player hosting or hybrid models.
Teams trying to estimate multiplayer infrastructure costs.
Live games reviewing server locations, reliability or scaling.

You do not need to be committed to a particular engine, hosting provider or infrastructure model to start the conversation.

Apply for your free multiplayer infrastructure audit

To apply, email [email protected] with the subject line Free Multiplayer Infrastructure Audit.

Tell us a little about:

Your studio and game.
Your current stage of development.
The type of multiplayer experience you are building.
The platforms and regions you are considering.
Any existing server setup.
The infrastructure questions causing you the most uncertainty.

Do not worry if you cannot answer everything. A short description is enough to begin.

The PingCore team will get back to you and organise a suitable time for a free call.

Multiplayer infrastructure can look intimidating when every decision appears connected to another. A focused conversation can make the problem much smaller and help your team spend its time and budget in the right places.

If multiplayer is part of your roadmap, let us take a look.

Email [email protected] to apply for a free audit.