How CCP Games Leverages GameFabric by Nitrado to Power the Future of Session-Based Gaming

Key Results

• 20x Faster Server Deployment: Server spin-up times were reduced from 5 minutes to 15 seconds.

• Unified Development & Production: Consolidated environments onto a single infrastructure, enabling constant playtesting and increasing development agility.
  
  

• Eliminated Operational Burden and Reduced Costs: Removed the complexity of managing global infrastructure, allowing CCP Games’ backend team to focus on core game development, and reduced server hosting costs by 60% compared to their previous provider.

Overview

At devcom 2025, CCP Games unveiled how their partnership with Nitrado enabled them to bring GameFabric’s cutting-edge game server infrastructure to their upcoming session-based title, EVE Vanguard. This collaboration has transformed CCP Games’ ability to scale dynamically, reduce latency, accelerate development cycles, and unlock new gameplay possibilities.

The Challenge: Limited Resources and Growing Demands

CCP Games faced fundamental constraints in their session-based server infrastructure: they needed to lower their server spin up time, make dev cycles quicker, improve their scaling response, and increase their speed to market. They also wished to migrate to server containerization and become more cost-efficient. However, their backend team was small, with just four engineers tasked with building and maintaining a hyperscale infrastructure. As Kurtis Lamb, the Senior Backend Engineer at CCP, explained: 

“We have a very ‘buy not build’ mentality. We cannot build our own Kubernetes clusters and host these rapidly scaling infrastructure. We have to cover everything that is not in the game.”

Furthermore, the current architecture that underpins EVE Online’s persistent world works great for connecting their globe-spanning audience, with servers ticking every 1 second, which gives plenty of time for player data to reach its central host point; however, for the session-based infrastructure and fast reaction time needed for Vanguard, a higher server refresh rate was required. This called for having multiple server data centers distributed around the world to optimize for player latency.

This in itself, however, breeds another challenge: scaling. Having globally distributed hardware always run at max capacity, especially during off hours, is inefficient and costly. The team at CCP realized that the short-lived nature of a session-based game demanded a new paradigm.

The Solution: GameFabric’s Hybrid Infrastructure

Nitrado operates its own global data centers and complements them with dynamic, elastic cloud scaling through a variety of providers. This hybrid model ensures CCP can provision low-latency, globally distributed bare metal servers while still having access to near-unlimited scale with the cloud when player spikes occur.

This approach removes the traditional limitations of bare metal capacity, enabling CCP to handle unpredictable player demand cost-effectively and spin up new servers almost instantly.

“This means we don’t have to host those Kubernetes clusters, we don’t have to worry about infrastructure, but we get all the benefits of having them.”

— Kurtis Lamb, Senior backend Engineer at CCP

On top of this, GameFabric supports Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), meaning developers can come with their current cloud commitments and have them managed by GameFabric’s SRE team.

“We’re already able to leverage that existing spend to get even further discounts, but also have the trust that when Nitrado’s SREs go to our account they do so in a shared responsibility model…this is great, it means I don’t have to write the Terraform but it sits in my account so I can see everything they’re doing. ”

— Kurtis Lamb, Senior Backend Engineer at CCP

GameFabric has also recently entered into a collaboration with Google Cloud as the platform’s preferred cloud provider. This opens up regions that may not be offered by other cloud providers, all without the need for a studio like CCP to sign up for their own account.

“This is great for us because we don’t want to get into a multi-cloud strategy where we can avoid it. So we can use Nitrado to leverage that for us.”

— Kurtis Lamb, Senior Backend Engineer at CCP

Networking & Reliability

Nitrado’s unique networking capabilities, such as operating its own ASN, allows CCP to benefit from improved network performance and reliability, better traffic management, and enhanced security. Because Nitrado owns this infrastructure, it enables a better player experience by opening access to the nearest data centers in the most cost-effective manner.

“I was quite surprised that players between those two regions (Miami and São Paulo) can play with very little latency to the point they don’t even notice.”

— Kurtis Lamb, Senior Backend Engineer at CCP

Development Agility & Efficiency

Beyond raw performance, Nitrado’s infrastructure has accelerated CCP’s development cycles. By consolidating development and production environments onto the same infrastructure, CCP gained agility and cost efficiency. This unified approach is powered by GameFabric’s developer-first toolset, featuring an API-first design and Terraform provider that enables infrastructure as code with seamless integration into CI/CD pipelines.

“We can comfortably say that new servers will respond to activities within 15 seconds, which is a massive reduction from 5 minutes. Realistically, I think this is about 8 seconds. So going from a server being reserved to making another one available is about 8 seconds; and that server is immediately playable…our life just becomes so much simpler because even with bugs, errors, crashes, et cetera, the platform will respond within such a low timescale that we don’t even know it’s happening.” 

— Kurtis Lamb, Senior Backend Engineer at CCP

Unlocking New Capabilities with GameFabric

This partnership has also enabled CCP to explore new advantages that were previously unattainable:

Dynamic Instance Scaling

CCP recognized the need to optimize resource usage, specifically the substantial CPU and Memory capacity reserved on every instance for intermittent peak loads. Online titles can often get hungry for resources, but having to consistently provision instances to satisfy these rare, periodic high-demand moments was neither optimal nor cost-efficient. GameFabric’s dynamic scaling was, therefore, a perfect fit.

“So we started looking at how we could massively change that, and that’s when we kind of came down to Nitrado’s GameFabric platform because we can leverage Kubernetes’ requests and limits approach. So the idea here is we will start every instance with the bare minimum of what it (a game server) needs…as those game servers get busy, players get up to shenanigans, they can consume from the overall host as and when they want, and then give it back again. Which means we can pack on more sessions onto a game server than we historically would.”

— Kurtis Lamb, Senior Backend Engineer at CCP

SteelShield™ – DDoS Protection

SteelShield™ is GameFabric’s patented, purpose-built DDoS protection system for game servers. Its focus is on the UDP game protocol and offers three tiers of traffic protection, including the ability to directly integrate into a game’s network stack for instant response, ensuring only validated packets ever make it to the server. This industry-unique mitigation solution is well-suited for gaming’s most sought after titles:

“There is no solution that can deal with these attacks appropriately…so we have decided to do the hard thing and do some UDP protection for game servers. We do this on three different levels: we do it on a data center level, we do it on a host level, and we do it on a per game instance level.”

— Andreas Pohl, Head of B2B at Nitrado

“For us, SteelShield™ was and still is best in industry DDoS protection. Almost certainly the per packet signing. It’s transparent, we haven’t seen any real challenges or issues with it, so for me it’s a big win.”

— Kurtis Lamb, Senior Backend Engineer at CCP

A True Partnership

GameFabric is a platform made by developers for developers. Because of this, it comes out of the box with a few advantages such as no SSO tax, no Seat License tax, shared environmental infrastructure, and a Terraform Provider and API that is immediately ready for use. 

Combining the aforementioned benefits and functionality of GameFabric, CCP was able to reduce their server cost by 60% when directly compared to their previous provider. But what’s more, a true partnership has arisen from this collaboration that has led to a simpatico between CCP and Nitrado. As Kurtis put it, CCP “sells friendship, not a video game.” EVE is fundamentally about community and interconnectedness, and this philosophy also drives CCP’s decision when choosing vendors.

“We have had some wonderful experiences with Nitrado, working with them on a day-to-day basis, coming to our Fanfest and doing the talk there, has been really important for us.”

Kurtis Lamb, Senior Backend Engineer at CCP

On September 16, 2025, EVE Vanguard held its Operation Nemesis public playtest with players dropping feet first into the MMOFPS. During the course of this playtest, EVE Vanguard found itself in need of additional server capacity, something which GameFabric was able to provide in under 30 minutes, highlighting the platform and its team’s commitment to this ongoing partnership.

Conclusion

Through its collaboration with Nitrado and the adoption of GameFabric, CCP Games has transformed its ability to deliver session-based experiences at scale. What began as a necessity to “buy, not build” has grown into a partnership that accelerates innovation, ensures stability, and empowers new gameplay frontiers. The success of this migration serves as a powerful blueprint for the future of multiplayer game development, where strategic infrastructure partnerships allow studios to focus their resources on creative ambition and player experience, rather than operational complexity.