On 28th August 2024, two and a half years after founding the company and securing investment, Makea Games launched multiplayer parkour sports title Supermoves.
The brainchild of serial game developer and Makea Games Founder, CEO and Creative Director Tomi Toikka, he describes the game as “a weird genre mashup – it’s Tony Hawk meets Fall Guys”.
Available in 10 languages, with 100s of levels of play, the option to play single player or multiplayer, Lego sets you can build your levels from and community leaderboards, the game is designed to enable players to create content as easily as something like Minecraft.
“Our goal at Makea Games is to make great games and then hand them over to players to let them extend it. They bring their imagination, and we bring the rest,” said Toikka.
Initially designed as a peer to peer game, Toikka and the team realised that they would never be able to scale Supermoves to the level that they believed it could reach unless they made it a multiplayer game based on dedicated servers. But they faced three big challenges: they’d never shipped a multiplayer game before, never made anything in Unreal Engine and never hosted a multiplayer game.
“What really sold us on choosing to go down the bare metal route with servers.com was the raw enthusiasm they showed for our game. It’s rare to get that from providers.”
The team had some experience with hosting their own game servers and managing simple cloud set ups but nothing that would support a multiplayer game.
“We looked at AWS and Microsoft Azure because they are popular options in the indie space, but they were very expensive. I knew at some point someone would turn around and ask me how much we were spending on infrastructure, and I didn’t want to have that conversation if we had gone fully down the hyperscale route. We had to consider other options,” explained Makea Games Founder and CTO Ville Valtiala.
The team decided that Microsoft Azure would be a good platform for burst capacity as and when they need it but wanted an alternative solution for their baseline CCU. The question was what other options were there outside of hyperscale cloud?
“We met servers.com at Nordic Game in May 2022 and they had some great ideas around how they could help us,” said Toikka. “But it’s an unmanaged service and we had never really worked with bare metal before.
“What really sold us on choosing to go down the bare metal route with servers.com was the raw enthusiasm they showed for our game. It’s rare to get that from providers. They demonstrated a mutual understanding and shared vision of what we were trying to achieve with Supermoves. We have an internal philosophy that I call ‘dream catcher’ which is about capturing the energy of the whole team and working towards a goal together, and servers.com’s approach reflects that philosophy.”
“The worst-case scenario would’ve been to get served the dream of bare metal on a silver platter, deploy it and the team to then just disappear. We’ve had completely the opposite with servers.com.”
Roll on two years and together the servers.com and Makea Games teams provisioned and deployed servers in data centers in East and West coast US, Singapore and Amsterdam ready for launch day.
“Because we are a startup with no historical data to pull from or a business intelligence function to anticipate player numbers, it was super important to us that we had an infrastructure environment that could scale up and down easily, in existing locations and potential new locations as well,” said Toikka.
“For example, during Steam Next Fest in June 2024 we made Supermoves available to play for a two week period. We saw 80% of our players coming from China and realised we needed to quickly spin up servers in Singapore.
“Similarly, if we decide we want to add more content down the line, we’ll need testing servers for a short period of time to test that content on. That level of flexibility and responsiveness has been a huge benefit to our partnership with servers.com.”
For Ville Valtiala, the reliability of the technology and additional services have made all the difference.
“The pre-installed Kubernetes has been a big time saver for me and made my life a lot easier. In general, I’ve never had any trouble with the technology – it just works,” said Ville.
While it may be an unmanaged service, the servers.com ethos isn’t to sign customers up, deploy servers and disappear.
“The worst-case scenario would’ve been to get served the dream of bare metal on a silver platter, deploy it and the team to then just disappear. We’ve had completely the opposite with servers.com. The team has gone way above and beyond what we expected, which is great because we needed the additional support. Without it, we wouldn’t be here running this hardware,” said Toikka.
“As a team, we’ve had to learn a lot as well and have been more hands on that we expected, but it has paid off. We are doing a global game launch and we’re doing it on time. Not many game studios can say they launched when they said they were going to.
“It’s the small things that have made all the difference to our experience. The servers.com team have been always completely honest and upfront. They’ve never missed a meeting. And the 2FA process is straight forward.”
“servers.com is and will continue to be a crucial part of our success. We’ve just had a lot of fun together (including many event after parties) and we need more of that in this industry.”
Reliability is key for games, especially for new, unknown studios. If the player experience is disrupted it can be difficult to come back from.
“It’s very unsafe territory to launch a video game,” explained Toikka. “We have to make sure that the game stays up. The game has to be available to make money. If it goes down, the reputation of the game and the studio goes down with it and that ability to make money is put at risk. We feel confident in servers.com’s ability to help us achieve a successful launch and beyond.
“While Supermoves may be our first game, it won’t be our last. We have a huge amount of creativity and drive in our team, and we are already looking at what’s next. servers.com is and will continue to be a crucial part of our success. We’ve just had a lot of fun together (including many event after parties) and we need more of that in this industry.”
