Inside the Stack: We See More Game Launches Than Any Studio Will

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

This time, we sat down with Hauke Löffler, a Technical Account Manager, who works alongside studio partners as part of GameFabric’s Customer Success team. An engineer at heart who spent years across high-stakes infrastructure, tech startups, and banking, Hauke now acts as the bridge between studio engineering teams and Nitrado’s internal developers. He helps studios navigate their server infrastructure, edge-case bugs, and the transition from launch-day stress to long-term stability.

Q: What has your gaming journey been like? Is there a title you keep coming back to?

The first thing that comes to mind is actually NetHack. I have a love-hate relationship with it. My longest rage quit was over a year, and I’ve still never beaten it despite coming close multiple times.

It’s a classic text-based roguelike over 30 years old, with a very old school 80x24 ASCII interface, and there’s so much you can do and break. It teaches you to be genuinely scared of basic characters on screen. You can spend 20 hours on a run with metal armor, get impatient, hit a rust trap, touch a monster, and turn to stone instantly all because you forgot to check for traps once and it’s done.

The other game I always come back to is Tetris. Sometimes you just need something where you get beaten by your daughter. The music is still burned into my brain!

Q: How did you get into this industry? Was there something about it that called to you?

I’m an engineer at heart. I started working in tech when I was 14 and had my first company by 18. I’ve worked across ten different companies, two of them were in gaming and I did a stint in banking infrastructure.

Whether it’s banking or multiplayer gaming, everything running on the internet is fundamentally built on the same principles. It’s keeping complex systems running under heavy load. What pulled me into gaming was the people and the chaos. Game developers build with incredible passion, but real players will always find ways to break systems faster than any QA department ever could. I loved that engineering challenge, and I wanted to be around people who truly care about what they build.

Q: What’s the day-to-day of a Customer Success Manager like here at Nitrado?

At the moment, it’s wild because we’re growing fast! I like to think of myself as a translator. I love being right in the middle, translating what the customer wants into what we can or should do, and showing them, “Hey, there might be a better way,” and I love finding ways to help the customer save money! It’s really about requirements engineering for both sides: what the customer needs, and what the product needs.

This is why talking is part of the package. You get dedicated time with me and a Slack channel during onboarding. Our product is good and, frankly, boring once you set it up and it’s running! But I’m so glad every new customer brings a new challenge; they find ways to use the platform no developer ever dreamed of. So on any given day, I’m a mix of QA, technical support, pre-sales, and working closely with UI/UX.

Q: What do you find most rewarding about working directly with studios?

The answer is the people, and the fact that we’re truly working together. And this isn’t marketing speak or fluff.

While account managers and studio leadership handle the business side, when I get on a call, it's just engineers on both sides working through real problems together without worrying about contracts or feature lists. Sometimes a studio reaches out like, “Hey, can you help us? A player found an exploit and we need to do something about it,” and we just jump in to help.

I love that, and I love the passion in gaming. You meet so many people who are passionate about what they do and proud of their work. This is really nice and rewarding.

Q: Is there a studio relationship that taught you something you didn’t expect?

I underestimated just how loyal and how passionate gamers are and this special relationship in the industry. It’s so close to the heart. They are really impacting lives, and this is what really impressed me.

I went to EVE FanFest last year and saw what Fenris Creations (formerly CCP) created. I saw hundreds of people fly to Iceland for this, getting game tattoos on-site, married couples who met in-game, players who haven’t played in years but still showing up for the community.

So for some people EVE Online is special, for some people Stardew Valley is special, and I really love how much of an impact gaming has on personal lives.

Q: What does a game’s launch day feel like from your side, especially in those early hours?

Being invited into a studio’s “situation room” on launch day is a massive honor. You are brought into the inner circle, watching their live dashboards, seeing player numbers climb on Xbox, Switch 2, or Game Pass, and experiencing their hopes and fears right alongside them.

For us as an infrastructure provider, we have the luxury of seeing a lot of launches. But for that studio, their launch defines their future. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, and in the best case, everything runs so smoothly that I don’t even need to be there. But being in that room is very special, because it’s so real.

Q: Is there a pattern in studios that run into trouble post-launch that’s usually visible before they call you?

Yes (and it’s almost never GameFabric!) It’s usually their backend, their matchmaking, their monitoring stacks or logging. It’s nice to stress test, but the chain will break on the weakest link.

Studios often test for linear scale, but jumping from a 1,000-player playtest to 300,000 players on launch day isn’t linear. There are so many things to think about, and that’s the thing about my passion for architecture, because sometimes small things break which seem insignificant on their own, but glued together, they become a catastrophe. Just like an airplane crash, where three, four, or five things stack up. You have to prepare for the “unknown unknowns”.

My advice to studios is to lean on our experience. We see more launches than a single studio will usually ever see, so trust us and ask questions! And be prepared for problems and delays, be transparent, and be honest with your community.

Q: There’s a moment where a studio’s relationship with GameFabric shifts from something they’re managing to something they trust. What does that look like?

I have a personal experience with one engineer where I did a lot of intense work because this was a game from the Hathora migration. They had four weeks to launch when they got the notice that Hathora was shutting down. It was a nice challenge where we couldn’t touch the game server anymore. So we did a full GameFabric integration without touching the server but we made it happen. And then we were like “oh, we’re done.” We don’t need to talk every night again. So it was really on the personal side: two engineers sad that this part of the relationship was over because we fulfilled our goal.

So there’s this moment where we don’t need to handhold and don’t need to have intense conversations. It’s like raising your child and seeing them go out into the wild. And even if they come back later with a new problem, both sides know, “we will solve this together.” The relationship shifts into a slower pace: scaling up, scaling down, saving money, and routine operations.

Q: For the GameFabric customers you work with, is there a metric or moment that defines success with the platform? Or is it a hard thing to measure?

For me, the moment of success is when it first “clicks” for the studio and it’s working in production. There are multiple ways of doing the same thing within GameFabric; we don’t force studios into a single solution because we have many approaches to find what’s best for them. Even with great documentation, every multiplayer stack is unique, which is why my role exists — to spend hands-on technical time on calls with teams to tailor everything to their setup.

Real success is when a studio’s mindset shifts from “Ugh, I need a hoster,” to “Hey, these people are really trying to make my life easier.” It’s when we find a working solution and the questions stop because it clicks and they go, “Yeah, we found it. We found what works.”

At the end of the day, we run exciting game servers, but the orchestration platform itself should be a routine product. And that’s exactly what success looks like.

Q: What does a studio actually get from having a Customer Success Manager being at their side?

They get the feeling of not being alone, and having a real human fighting on their side. No AI nonsense, no web forms, no async runaround. The real benefit of having a human technical advocate is the quality time two engineers spend together solving a problem.

Our team really cares. If we see a usage pattern where changing a value in GameFabric will save a studio money in cloud costs, we bring it to them immediately because we believe in long-term relationships.

I see myself as a magic shortcut creator. I have a magic wand that lets me bridge our devs and their devs, bring them together, and watch them do the work. At the end of the day, I think this is the most valuable thing a studio can get.

Q: What’s the most underrated game?

Everybody knows Tetris, so on paper it’s not “underrated.” But people don’t realize how deeply it touches me. I love watching the new generation compete in NES Tetris tournaments and break world records (shout out to Blue Scuti!). I had tears watching documentaries by YouTube channels like aGameScout and Summoning Salt on the history of Tetris world records and speedrunning.

I would love to go to a tournament. It’s on my bucket list. NES Tetris is the peak of gaming. Shout out to the developers of Factorio and No Man’s Sky, they are incredible, but my answer is NES Tetris!

Hauke Löffler is a Technical Account Manager at Nitrado, supporting studio integrations on GameFabric. Connect with him on LinkedIn.