Inside the Stack: The Best Orchestration Platform Is the One You Forget Is There

Welcome to Inside the Stack, where the people behind Nitrado talk through the real decisions, tradeoffs, and lessons behind running multiplayer games.

This time, we sat down with Torben, Senior B2B Product Manager for GameFabric. After years across QA, localization, and product roles in the games industry, he’s now the one deciding what gets built next, and why.

Q: You've been in the games industry for a long time, how's that been? What do you love about it?

It's been a great journey so far.

What I still love most about the games industry is the people. Whether you're talking to an indie developer or a large AAA studio, there's usually a genuine passion for what they're building.

I've worked in a lot of different areas over the years, and one thing I've learned is that everyone is ultimately trying to create a great experience for players. Being part of that process is something I still enjoy today.

And honestly, I can't really imagine working in another industry. Games have always felt a little different. There's a lot of creativity, a lot of strong opinions, and a lot of people who genuinely care about what they do.

Q: How did you get into gaming?

I started with a Commodore 64 as a kid and was immediately hooked.

Like many kids growing up with games, I wasn't just interested in playing them, I was fascinated by the idea that somebody actually made them. And of course, at that age, almost everyone dreams about making their own game one day.

I never really had a master plan for getting into the industry. To be honest, I think there was quite a bit of luck involved when I got my first opportunity at EA. I certainly didn't have an impressive portfolio to show.

Once I got in, though, I became curious about every part of the business. I've always believed that if you want to understand a company, you need to understand the people and disciplines that make it work.

That's why I've spent time across QA, localization, project management, product management, licensing, and customer-facing roles throughout my career.

What keeps me in games is the people and the culture. I could never picture myself sitting in a suit in a traditional corporate environment. The games industry has its challenges, but it's full of creative, passionate people, and that's something I've always enjoyed being around.

Q: What is your day to day here at Nitrado with GameFabric?

No two days are exactly the same, which is probably one of the reasons I enjoy the role.

A part of my job is talking to studios and understanding the challenges they're facing. But I'm not spending all day in customer calls.

A lot of my time goes into taking customer feedback and turning it into actual product concepts. I work closely with our development teams, Customer Success Managers, and other stakeholders to make sure we're solving the right problems. In many ways, I act as the bridge between customers and the teams building the product.

Another important part of my role is prioritization. We don't have unlimited resources, so we have to be thoughtful about what we build next. Not every good idea can be done immediately, which means constantly balancing customer needs, business priorities, and long-term product goals.

And finally, I spend quite a bit of time keeping up with what's happening in the industry. New technologies, new trends, new challenges studios are facing. I always try to understand what's changing and whether there's an opportunity for GameFabric to help.

Q: How do you decide what gets built next?

I always try to understand the problem before looking at a solution.

Sometimes customers come to us with a very specific feature request, but often they simply describe a challenge they're facing. In those cases, it's our job to figure out the best solution.

When multiple studios run into the same problem, that's usually a strong signal that we should take a closer look.

From there, we evaluate impact, effort, and how well a potential solution fits into the long-term vision of the platform. Since resources are always limited, prioritization becomes just as important as innovation.

At the end of the day, good product decisions come from understanding customer problems, not just collecting feature requests.

Q: What do you think makes a truly great infrastructure product? The thing most studios don't appreciate until it's missing?

Trust.

If you're running a live game, you need to trust your infrastructure.

Nobody gets excited because a deployment worked exactly as expected. Nobody writes a LinkedIn post because their servers scaled correctly. But when those things don't happen, everyone notices immediately.

The best infrastructure products are the ones that quietly do their job every single day.

Q: What does a studio actually need from an orchestration platform that they rarely say out loud at the start?

Studios want orchestration, but what they actually want is to not think about orchestration. The best version of GameFabric is the one they forget is running; until something needs their attention, and then it's completely obvious. That tension shapes almost every product decision on the platform.

Q: Is there a feature or decision in GameFabric that came directly from a studio's feedback?

Absolutely.

Some of our best improvements came from studios telling us where they experienced friction in their daily workflows.

Sometimes it's not a big feature request. Sometimes it's a small operational pain point that costs teams time every week.

That's one of the advantages of working closely with customers. We get to see how the platform is actually used in production, and that often leads to better product decisions than anything we could come up with internally.

Q: What does a real migration look like from a product perspective? What always gets underestimated?

People often think migration is mostly a technical challenge.

In reality, the bigger challenge is usually changing habits and processes.

Every studio has workflows they've developed over years. They have deployment procedures, monitoring setups, internal documentation, and people who are comfortable with how things work today.

The technology can often be migrated faster than the organization can adapt to the change. This is why it was so important for us to build GameFabric on open standards. The tooling we use is already familiar to most developers, so our processes naturally streamline their work.

Q: What do studios consistently get wrong in the first 90 days, and how does that shape how the product evolves?

A common mistake is trying to recreate every detail of their previous setup.

That's understandable because teams want to minimize risk.

But sometimes that means they miss opportunities to simplify things. New platforms work best when teams adopt the platform's strengths instead of rebuilding old processes exactly as they existed before.

That's taught us that product design isn't just about features; it’s also about making things feel intuitive.

Q: Where does GameFabric still have room to grow? What's on the horizon for us?

A lot, honestly.

The industry keeps changing, and the challenges studios face keep changing as well.

What excites me most is finding ways to reduce complexity. Development teams are expected to move faster than ever, and infrastructure shouldn't slow them down.

Our goal is to make operating live games easier, more predictable, and less time-consuming so teams can focus on what they actually want to do: build great games and serve their players.

There's still a lot of opportunity ahead, and that's one of the reasons it's such an interesting space to work in.

Torben Reis-Effgen is Senior B2B Product Manager at Nitrado, working on GameFabric. Connect with him on LinkedIn.