"Can I Play Your Game?" The Question That Started PlayFlow
Five years ago, I spent a weekend trying to get multiplayer working in my Unity game. What should have been simple turned into a maze of VPS configurations, SSH tunnels, and Linux commands that had nothing to do with game development. That experience eventually evolved into PlayFlow, but the journey there wasn't what I expected.
The problem that started everything
It was 2020, and I decided to finally build my own multiplayer game in my spare time. I opened up Unity and started tinkering with networking. At first, the workflow seemed straightforward: run two Unity editors, one as the server and the other as the client, and watch them talk to each other.
It worked. On my machine, everything clicked. My little multiplayer prototype was alive.
Naturally, the next step was obvious: show it to a friend. That’s when I hit the question that would change everything:
How do I actually get someone else to play this with me?
We needed a public server. Which meant I had to host one. Somewhere. Somehow.
The infrastructure maze
I was a full stack developer at a tech company, comfortable with Docker, AWS, and production servers. Even so, hosting a single game server was far from simple:
# Step 1: Get a VPS
# Step 2: SSH in
$ ssh root@ip
# Step 3: Install dependencies
$ apt-get install...
# Step 4: Configure firewall
$ ufw allow 7777/tcp
# Step 5: Transfer build
$ scp server.zip root@ip:/home/...
# Step 6: Run it
$ ./GameServer -batchmode -nographics
But then, after all that setup, I finally had the aha moment. My friends connected, and we created the classic player tower stack:
All that setup just so my friends and I could jump and create the player tower stack. Worth it.
And that was just for testing with a few friends. Supporting multiple regions, concurrent matches, and production reliability multiplied the complexity.
Could I do it? Sure. But building great games and managing infrastructure are two very different things. Every hour spent SSHing into servers was an hour not spent improving gameplay.
Building what I needed
Fast forward to 2021, as I continued to work on my game, I had created a Unity plugin to deploy game servers directly from the editor:
- Build in Unity
- Click a button
- Plugin zips, uploads, starts the server
- Get back a public IP
No SSH. No manual Linux commands.
The accidental product
Friends tried it and loved it. I shared a video online. Developers started using it right away because it solved a universal multiplayer pain point:
"I've started my multiplayer game, wouldn't it be nice if I could play my game with someone."
That simple plugin became PlayFlow.
At first, it was just that one feature. But as more developers came on board, they asked for more. Matchmaking. Regional hosting. Logs. Security features. Each request came from a real problem they were facing.
What started with a handful of developers testing their games has grown to thousands of games being built on PlayFlow. The platform has launched over half a million game servers to date. And piece by piece, PlayFlow grew organically into something much bigger than I had imagined.
What actually got built
That simple plugin evolved into a complete game server orchestration platform. Today, PlayFlow lets game developers spin up their games anywhere in the world in seconds, with blazing fast matchmaking and lobby systems that scale automatically.
What started as "just get my Unity game online" became something much bigger:
- Global infrastructure spanning 12 regions across 6 continents
- Universal engine support - Unity, Unreal, Godot, and custom engines all work the same way
- Automatic scaling - servers spin up when players need them, shut down when they don't
- Built-in matchmaking - no more "how do we get players into games?"
- Production-ready features - SSL, DDoS protection, and monitoring that teams actually need to ship
The biggest surprise? Small teams shipped games with less overhead, focusing on gameplay instead of servers.
Where this goes
I never set out to build an infrastructure company. I just wanted to finish my game. But solving my own problem revealed a bigger one shared by developers everywhere.
Today, PlayFlow has helped thousands of developers ship multiplayer games. We've powered millions of hours of gameplay across every continent. Some servers spin up for 5-minute playtests, others run competitive matches all day, and many host persistent MMO worlds that haven't gone down in months. The variety of games people build still amazes me.
My game? Still not finished. Infrastructure is never "done." There's always another optimization or region to add. But seeing developers launch games they couldn't have built otherwise? That's the real reward.
If you're wrestling with multiplayer infrastructure, PlayFlow was built for you. Check out the docs or give it a try.
And yes, I know: building an entire platform instead of finishing my game is peak developer behavior. 🤷♂️