We build and operate the parts of MMO and ambitious-multiplayer tech that most co-dev shops won't touch — dedicated servers, replication at scale, server-authoritative simulation, live ops. Embedded in your pipeline in 72 hours, shipping under your brand.
ATONE is the MMORPG we built — five years of full-cycle production for an external client, end-to-end across every discipline. The work that earned us the right to talk about MMO co-development. Five years of custom server architecture, replication tuning, and simulation work. Every problem a partner studio brings us, we've probably hit a version of it ourselves.
ATONE's target wasn't open-world scale. It was the opposite: dense, art-directed layers where 70 CCU share a single simulation — full skeletal animation, physics-driven movement, networked ability effects, handcrafted Nanite geometry, and AI entities in the same frame.
70 CCU per layer is modest compared to a 2005 MMO. But when every character runs GPU skinning, Mover 2.0 physics, and IRIS-replicated state, you hit ceilings that a low-fidelity MMO never touches. When AI density broke our GAS-tick budget, we batched regular-mob ticks into one global update; the bottleneck shifted onto navmesh and perception — where we wanted it. That's the problem we signed up for, and the kind of instinct we now bring to partner projects.
The stack is deliberately conservative on boundaries and aggressive inside them: all gameplay state is server-authoritative, clients predict and rewind, and replication is tuned per-feature rather than generic.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ CLIENT · UE5 · Prediction + Rewind · GPU Skin │
└──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┘
│ IRIS Replication
│ NetObjectGroups (area-filtered)
│ Delta codec (Mover 2.0 state)
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ DEDICATED SERVER · Linux · UE5 Standalone │
│ Server-auth simulation · Interest mgmt · Anti-cheat │
└──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┘
│ gRPC / Protobuf
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ BACKEND SERVICES · Go · PostgreSQL · Redis │
│ Auth · Characters · Inventory · Telemetry │
└──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ OPS · Terraform · K8s · Grafana + Loki │
│ Per-area shards · Blue/green deploys · Runbooks │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘The dedicated server is a standalone UE5 build running Linux in containers. The replication layer uses IRIS with custom NetObjectGroups for area-based filtering — the first thing that falls over at 70 CCU without intentional scoping. Backend services are Go on PostgreSQL, with Redis for session and presence. The fleet is Terraform-managed with per-area shards and observability through Grafana plus Loki.
The honest value of a partner who's shipped the thing isn't that we know the happy path — it's that we know the ways it goes wrong. Here are four we can save you:
NetObjectGroups a given object actually belongs to at runtime. We bring that tracer to client projects on IRIS.The point of ATONE isn't that the MMORPG we built is the biggest or the fastest or the most successful. The point is that we've spent five years inside a production MMORPG making the same kinds of decisions you're making now — and we can come in on day three and tell you what we'd do and why.
The honest value of a partner who's shipped it isn't the happy path. It's knowing the ways it breaks — and what to do when it does.
Whether you're standing up a new server stack, inheriting one that's buckling under load, moving to IRIS, hitting a replication ceiling, or trying to get simulation cost under control at higher CCU — we've likely been there.
A dedicated team — engineers, designers, artists as needed — drops into your pipeline and reports to your producers. Work lands in your repo under your processes. Team scales up or down with the roadmap.
We own a discrete feature or vertical slice end-to-end — “ship the dungeon system,” “migrate to IRIS,” “stand up the matchmaking service” — with milestone gates and agreed acceptance criteria.
Short, senior-led engagement. We come in, profile your stack, find the blockers, and deliver a concrete remediation plan — with optional follow-through. For teams stuck on a specific multiplayer problem.
Send your stack, your target scale, and the problem that's blocking you. We'll come back with a concrete read and a proposal — not a sales deck.
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