We want online multiplayer game hosting to be open, portable, and easy to run.
WordPress and projects like Ghost made web publishing easier with two things: a free, open-source codebase that runs on a small commodity server, and a managed hosting service for people who don’t want to run a server. We want to change the fact that many online games give player communities limited control or stop working when their official servers shut down.
A Platform for Multiple Audiences
gg-scale is built primarily for these three groups:
Developers launching new games. Indie studios and smaller publishers get a cheap, no-lock-in backend. They self-host on a small VPS or use gg-scale Cloud as a managed service. The open-source path also gives them a clean answer for what happens when the title eventually winds down.
Publishers managing online multiplayer games. When a studio decides to shut a multiplayer game down, it has the option to port the game to the open-source gg-scale platform. Community members can then run the game themselves while the publisher hands off ownership without friction.
Player communities keeping games alive and hosting their own game servers. For current games that ship on gg-scale, communities can stand up their own servers—with optional mod support, in their own regions, for tournaments, or just for groups of friends. When a game is built with gg-scale and the publisher later sunsets the title, the community can host the same backend the studio used and keep playing. This lets people continue playing without relying on the publisher’s central infrastructure.
The Problem
When a publisher shuts an online game’s servers down, much of the game stops working. Sometimes the studio has closed, the title no longer earns enough to operate, or a shift in corporate strategy leaves the project behind. The causes vary, but the result is the same: players lose access to a game they wanted to keep playing.
The Stop Killing Games movement has spent the last few years arguing this should change. The movement asks that when a publisher sunsets a multiplayer title, players should get a self-host path, an offline mode, or a refund.
The genuine challenge the game industry faces is that retrofitting an offline or self-hosted path into a shipped multiplayer game can be really difficult and resource-intensive. The authentication code has to work with PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Steam, or Epic. Game saves and player progression are woven through proprietary services. Matchmaking is locked behind closed-source services. Friends and presence depend on platform-specific social graphs, and the data inside them is regulated by GDPR. Handing the community a working server isn’t simple; it’s months of unfunded engineering on a title that’s no longer earning money.
While studios’ challenges are very real, players are asking for something the industry isn’t delivering yet: a better experience with games they love and want to keep playing.
Sustainable Value for Players and Developers
gg-scale gives developers and communities the core tools for an online game: peer-to-peer connections, matchmaking, authentication, player data, leaderboards, dedicated servers, and lobbies. This stack gives studios a service with no vendor lock-in and a cleaner exit when a title winds down; less proprietary code has to be replaced, and players have a path to keep the game running.
Deployment is simple, like setting up a Ghost or WordPress site. The service is a single Go binary: put it on a server, connect it to a Postgres database, configure email, and it runs. Docker Compose files are included for simple deployments, and our deployment guides explain how to run the full service with all features.
Portability is guaranteed. You have the source code, the binary, and your exported Postgres data. Dynamic dedicated server management runs through a flexible plugin system, so gg-scale can create servers on Docker, Kubernetes, or supported cloud backends. Supporting multiple backends matters because it keeps the platform useful across different hosting environments and reduces vendor lock-in.
Players and developers who do not want to operate the stack can use our managed gg-scale Cloud service to host their games. It keeps the same open core as the self-hosted version but handles all server management and hosting for them. Sign up at https://ggscale.com.
How Preservation Actually Works
Open-source licensing. To encourage long-term community use and contribution, we rely exclusively on Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved open-source licenses. We use the community-friendly Apache License 2.0, which many other great open-source projects use as well. A studio that builds on the gg-scale service owns a working backend it can keep running, fork, or hand to a community without renegotiating a license. Studios get the core features they need with simple open-source licensing.
SDKs that simplify the move to open source. The Go and C# SDKs follow standard patterns and sit behind a small set of well-defined interfaces. A studio swapping in gg-scale to replace a proprietary backend integrates against that surface instead of taking on an open-ended rewrite.
Self-hosted or managed cloud. Studios that want to operate their own backend can run the Go binary on a Linux box. Studios that don’t want to operate anything can use gg-scale Cloud. Either path reduces the challenges of developing and managing a game on bespoke backend platforms and avoids the lock-in of having to maintain a proprietary stack forever.