We built the thing we wanted.
10+ years of shipping games, one recurring headache. PlayServ is the platform we kept wishing existed while we were stitching Firebase to PlayFab to Photon to a VM we rented ourselves.
Built by game developers who got tired of the same fight.
For more than 10 yearswe've been shipping games — mobile, PC, web, a little console. Different genres, different teams, same week-by-week pattern:
- Week 1 — exciting prototype.
- Week 4 — "we need accounts, leaderboards, an economy."
- Week 6 — stitching PlayFab + Firebase + Redis + a bespoke Node.js box + whatever Photon room server we could rent that month.
- Week 12 — the "bespoke backend" has become the project. The game is the side effect.
Every team we worked with rebuilt the same three things: remote config with game-aware segmentation, an event timeline for live ops, and a sync layer that wouldn't melt under real traffic. Sometimes it worked. Often the budget ran out before the onboarding did.
Every platform we tried was 30% of the stack, or 100% of a vendor's opinion.
We tried them all. PlayFab's enterprise vibe. Beamable — right direction, acquired by Skillz in 2026 before the marketplace vision could compound. GameSparks — killed by AWS in September 2022 while we were mid-migration. Nakama's open-source-everything-or-nothing. Firebase, built for apps, not games. Photon, networking but not the rest. Hathora, hosting only — closed May 5, 2026.
None of them had a visual canvas. None had a marketplace. None were reactive by architecture. Every integration was a middleware tax paid in human-hours.
So we built the thing we wanted.
PlayServ is one platform with twelve modules grouped into six pillars, sharing one event bus and one runtime. Canvas for drawing backend logic without writing code. Marketplace for patterns other studios already solved. AI / MCP as a first-class interface from day one.
A config change in Pulse fires Canvas pipelines, updates Lens dashboards, and retargets Market offers — instantly. Not because we wrote that integration. Because they share a bus.
One bill. One status page. One place to look when something breaks.
Who we are
A small team, distributed across several timezones. We've shipped games that made money, games that didn't, games that were ahead of their time, and one game we'd rather not talk about. We have opinions. We've changed our minds.
We're building PlayServ so our next game — and yours — can be about the game, not the plumbing.