Four weeks. Fixed fee. The unvarnished read on whether your multiplayer stack is going to ship.
Run by the team that spent five years building a UE5 MMORPG to 70 CCU per layer with Souls-tier combat fidelity — IRIS, Mover, GAS, custom dedicated servers, GPU-accelerated animation. The audit you'd run yourself if you'd already shipped it.
THE PROBLEM
Your internal lead knows there are problems. They don't have the calendar to call which ones are real.
You are six months, twelve months, eighteen months into a UE5 multiplayer build. Player count is climbing, the layer is starting to creak, IRIS is misbehaving on the systems you didn't migrate cleanly, GAS is bottlenecking somewhere nobody can find, the Mover API churn between engine minor versions has eaten two sprints. Your internal lead knows there are problems. They don't have the calendar, the distance from the codebase, or the comparison data points to call which problems are real, which are noise, and which will eat the next milestone.
An external read from a team that has been to the bottom of every one of these problems on a five-year UE5 MMO is the cheapest insurance you can buy before the next milestone gate.
SCOPE
MENU
Six audit surfaces. You pick three to five.
The audit is calibrated to four weeks of senior time. We don't try to audit everything; we audit the four to six surfaces that matter most for your build.
- IRIS adoption posture — what's migrated, what's still on Replication Graph, what should be either way
- Replication frequency tuning, dormancy, relevancy at your CCU target
- Authority model audit — server-auth vs. client-auth-with-rollback decision per system
- Bandwidth profile — what's spending bytes that shouldn't be, what should be
- Hit registration latency budget — the path from input to confirmed-on-server
- CharacterMovementComponent vs. Mover decision review — does the choice hold for your combat fidelity target?
- Mover API churn risk audit (engine version migration cost over the next 12 months)
- Root motion, prediction, server reconciliation correctness
- Movement bandwidth — encoded delta budget, prediction window cost
- GAS extension boundary — what's GAS-native, what's custom, where the boundary should move
- GAS-tick performance at your density target
- Predictor design for asymmetric-latency combat
- Authoring ergonomics — is your design team productive in GAS, or is GAS slowing them down?
- CPU anim-tick budget at peak density
- Compute-shader pose evaluation — is it on the table, is it worth it for your scene?
- Anim-graph complexity audit — where the budget is spending
- LOD strategy — Nanite alignment + skeletal LOD bands
- Single-instance scaling profile (CCU per layer; CPU, memory, network ceiling)
- Sharding, layer / region topology, transitions
- Backend integration — economy, persistence, matchmaking, presence
- Build vs. buy review — Pragma, AccelByte, Photon, SpatialOS, custom
- Telemetry coverage — what you can see, what you can't, what's about to bite you
- Hotfix / patching architecture — how fast can you ship a server-side change?
- Observability and on-call posture
- Incident response and rollback plan
You pick three to five of these surfaces; we calibrate the four weeks to depth-not-breadth.
PROOF
OF WORK
Three audits we've already done — at our own expense.
These are the three compounding outcomes from the ATONE build that make the audit credible. Each is documented in the post-mortem and provides the methodology and benchmarks the audit applies to your project.
Three tiers. Fixed fee. No T&M.
| Tier | Fee | Scope | Senior staffing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit Light | €30,000 | 3 audit surfaces, 4 weeks, 1 lead + 1 senior | Lead: senior architect (Lead Engineer tier). Senior: discipline-specialist senior. |
| Audit Standard | €45,000 | 4 audit surfaces, 4 weeks, 1 lead + 1 senior + part-time discipline lead | As Light + part-time Lead Tech Artist or Lead Designer for one cross-cutting surface. |
| Audit Heavy | €60,000 | 5–6 audit surfaces, 4–6 weeks, 1 lead + 2 seniors | Two seniors run two parallel audit tracks; lead synthesizes. |
Fixed fee. Scope is locked at engagement start. If the audit surfaces something that genuinely needs another two weeks to investigate, we'll tell you and quote that as an extension — but the base audit price doesn't move.
If you take a Pod engagement within 90 days of audit delivery, the full audit fee is credited against the first month of the Pod. The audit is the discovery for the engagement; the engagement is the work the audit recommended. Pricing reflects that path.
THE TEAM
The audit is always senior-led.
The audit is led by a senior architect who has spent five years on a UE5 MMO. The senior staffed alongside the lead is the discipline specialist matched to your audit surfaces.
Audit lead (default): Max Makarenko, CTO & Lead Client Architect. Prior pedigree: Crytek (CryEngine / AAA multiplayer), EPAM Systems (enterprise engineering services), Dragons Lake. Five years on the ATONE backend, IRIS migration, dedicated-server architecture. The author of the technical bets section in our post-mortem.
Discipline seniors (matched to audit surfaces):
- Replication / netcode / dedicated server — Makarenko's depth area; staffed with a senior backend engineer.
- GAS / combat / movement — staffed with a senior gameplay engineer who shipped Souls-tier combat in ATONE.
- Animation pipeline & performance — Lukman Shih (Technical Animation Director) — author of the GPU-anim system.
- World partition / Nanite / Lumen / level streaming — Serhii Lisetskyi (Lead Tech Artist) — GSC Game World pedigree, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. studio.
The audit is always senior-led. Audit Light has one senior plus the lead — both Senior or Lead-tier engineers. We don't staff audits with mid-tier engineers and we don't subcontract.
Four weeks. Five gates.
The questions we get asked.
"We're at 30 CCU today, climbing to 70+. Is the audit still relevant?"
"We're not on UE5 yet — we're on UE4.27. Can you audit?"
"We're using Pragma / AccelByte / Photon — does the audit cover the middleware seam?"
"What if the audit just confirms what we already know?"
"Who owns the audit document?"
"How fast can we start?"
"Can we do this under our MSA?"
Book a 30-minute scoping call.
Tell us your engine version, your CCU target, your timeline, and the two surfaces that worry you most. We'll come back with an audit-tier recommendation, a calendar, and a fixed quote within five business days.
Book the call→