How Kubernetes Became the Standard for Running Online Multiplayer Games

As a young engineer getting his feet wet in games, Mark Mandel was dispatched to Game Developers Conference, the biggest industry event of the year. What he discovered was an industry caught between reigns. The cloud had arrived for games. But most major game companies were still coding bespoke IT systems from scratch and manually managing rooms full of servers.

“People were coming up to us and asking, ‘What are you doing for game servers? What’s the deal at Google Cloud?’” Mandel, founder of the Agones open-source project, told The Forecast. 

Mandel and his software-engineer colleagues went back and kicked some ideas around. They landed on an open, modular system that would make it easier for developers to build out their IT stack and scale games across a mix of clouds and data centers.

“We had this thing called Kubernetes that manages lots of machines. It does so much of the work that you need to do for running software at scale,” he said.

Kubernetes, the open-source platform for deploying and scaling containerized applications, went public in 2014 after being developed internally at Google. 

“My peers and I started to coalesce around the idea of running game servers on it. It just kind of made sense, especially for Google at that time. We had a lot of open-source momentum. It was something we were getting behind,’” he said.

That project became Agones, a custom platform built on top of Kubernetes to handle the unique workloads required to run online multiplayer games. Since reaching its 1.0.0 milestone in 2019, the small project has grown into a force. It has been embraced by some of the best-known names, including PlayStation Studios, Sega, Ubisoft and the South Korean gaming giant Krafton.

In the process, Mandel became a keen advocate for cloud native technology to the world of video games. He understands the strategy and techniques behind bringing some of the world’s biggest games to scale. He says that complex infrastructure strategies and game industry chaos are driving interest in Kubernetes, bringing more attention to the platform while simultaneously presenting new challenges.

The Standard Everywhere

A Kubernetes whisperer to gaming IT leaders, Mandel mentors top brass at major studios on how they are thinking about their infrastructure. He says the games industry has largely pivoted to containers for running online multiplayer games. Previously, games ran directly on virtual machines (VMs) and bare metal servers. Now game servers are orchestrated by platforms like Kubernetes.

“There are still absolutely VM-based orchestration systems out in the wild. But from what I've seen, Kubernetes is the standard everywhere,” he said. “It’s definitely a different landscape from back in 2016 where game companies were running a hundred machines in their own data centers.”

Mandel explains how game companies use Kubernetes and containerization technology to navigate the intricacies of operating a high-stakes global games business. Primarily, it’s used to run online multiplayer games, scaling to thousands of containerized “dedicated servers” and microservices that assemble players in matches.

He says the ability to orchestrate workloads across cloud and on-prem environments is a big draw. They launch in the cloud to anticipate a stampede of players. They shift to doing more on-premises for improved price-performance.

“The games industry can be fickle,” he said. “It’s a hits-driven business. You want that cloud flexibility to handle that load. But once you have an idea of what your player base looks like, it becomes less of a risk to invest in on-prem. Usually, you are doing a bit of both.”

He also sees studios blending approaches. Some will run a lightweight Kube cluster locally during development and testing, switching to a provider’s orchestration system when the game enters production.

“It’s easy because everything is containerized, and a lot of the [providers] who run game server workloads have containerized options. You can pick it up and move it as long as the game is developed with that in mind,” he said.

Build or Buy the IT Stack?

Mandel frames the core tension for multiplayer developers as a “build or buy” conversation. Are we going to build our own stack? How do we want to build it? What parts do we want to hand off? Shakeup in the games business, including layoffs, higher costs, and infrastructure provider exits, is complicating the calculus, making the answers less apparent.

“The industry is doing some very interesting things at the moment. It’s been a rough time for a lot of people. Game companies are weighing how easy it is to get people, how easy it is to get money for OpEx, and how they want to spend it,” he said.

He says that Agones falls on the “build” end of the spectrum. It’s for organizations that want end-to-end control over their infrastructure, are willing to invest in IT staff to manage it, and have the know-how to build the necessary multiplayer-specific backend components.

The alternative is “buying” a fully managed and orchestrated backend. He says that consolidation in the game server orchestration market is tipping the scales the other way. He points to the closure of two key orchestration platforms: Unity Multiplay and Hathora in March and May of 2026, respectively. He says that an in-house approach helps developers sidestep the risk.

“Nothing against using these guys,” Mandel said. “I’m just saying that things shift. We've seen that consistently over the last decade. There’s always a risk. At the same time, if you don’t have the in-house talent or infrastructure, you can just spend money and hand everything off. It’s their problem, not yours, which is a good thing. So, trade-offs all around.”

The Path Ahead for Multiplayer Gaming

Mandel serves as the head maintainer of the Agones repository, and the past year has been a busy one for him and his GitHub cohorts. When he isn’t rigorously enforcing a ‘no AI code slop’ policy with the ban hammer, he is forging alliances to propel the project forward.