Reliable server infrastructure for a F2P game

What the talk is about

Ivan Malyshev talks about building reliable server infrastructure for a free-to-play game, based on Fishing Planet. He stresses that reliability is not only technical but also organizational: Scrum, self-organizing teams, retrospectives, effective meetings and an MVP approach for quick feedback. On the architecture side, he advises planning scalability and anti-cheat from the start, separating static and dynamic data, caching heavily and keeping the number of technologies low. He walks through the setup: a master server, Photon-based game servers, a chat server, several databases and an asynchronous processor. He also covers continuous integration, automated releases, test environments, closed beta, integration-focused testing, technical debt and analytics. The Q&A touches on peak load and anti-cheat. Useful for backend developers and F2P leads.