1. Introduction
On January 24, 2024, the highly anticipated game Enshrouded was released on Steam into Early Access, becoming an instant hit and reaching over 1 million players in the first week of release. This came as no surprise since Enshrouded had been at the top of Steam Wishlist charts for months, with over 200.000 new wishlists added after its demo became the most-played during Steam Next Fest in October 2023, boasting 439,685 players. Game outlets praised Enshrouded post-release for many aspects, including the expansive world, intelligent crafting systems, and the voxel-based open-world, which allows players to interact with and change nearly everything they see and touch in their adventure.
In that first week, Enshrouded also recorded impressive player engagement metrics, with an average daily peak concurrent user (CCU) count of 119,710, and a peak CCU of 160,405. The average daily active users (DAU) reached 452,998, with a maximum DAU of 564,782. These numbers highlighted the game’s immense popularity and the scale of infrastructure required to support such an active player base.
GPORTAL has seen Enshrouded in its infancy and was sure that this project is special. Being a hoster specialized on video games for over 20 years, with a track record of hosting some of the most influential and popular games of all times, one could say you develop “a keen eye for quality”. We were humbled and very excited to get in touch with Keen Games and CFO Pete Walentin to talk about a possible partnership that might become a German success story. But first, let’s take a closer look at Enshrouded and why finding GPORTAL as a reliable partner for a project of this magnitude was a must.
The game is an ambitious survival RPG that blends elements from popular titles like Valheim, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Minecraft. Set in the vast, mysterious world of Embervale, players take on the role of the Flameborn, one of the last surviving humans in a land consumed by a dark, mist-like entity known as the Shroud. The game combines exploration, crafting, base-building, and combat in a richly detailed environment, offering players a truly immersive experience. Given the game’s reliance on cooperative play and its dynamic, player-driven environment, Keen Games identified the need for a robust and reliable server infrastructure early in the development process.
GPORTAL’s proven expertise in hosting complex multiplayer games made them the ideal choice to ensure that Enshrouded’s online experience would be as seamless and enjoyable as the game’s design intended. With features like voxel-based building, intricate crafting systems, and the potential for large-scale multiplayer interactions, the technical demands were significant. Stability, low latency, and the ability to scale quickly to accommodate a growing player base were non-negotiable requirements to deliver the smooth, lag-free experience that players expect.
“We haven’t been sure how much and if at all Enshrouded would become a success” was Pete’s first reaction when asked about what makes Enshrouded special and if he expected this kind of success. “Due to the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the Demo players who could play at Steam Next Fest in October 2023 we had high hopes, but being long enough in the industry, we knew we also needed to be at the right place and hit the right time releasing Enshrouded into Early Access. It looks like we did.“
When asked if Keen Games included learnings from previous games or tried building Enshrouded from scratch, Pete had this to say: “With the experience we gained by developing and supporting our previous games as GaaS, especially with Portal Knights, we decided to build upon that. We wanted to create something bigger, something more mature, something which fit a broader range of players.”
2. Objective
If we’re talking about the infrastructure of a demanding multiplayer title like Enshrouded, there are key metrics that always come to mind: scalability, reliability, low latency and a seamless player experience, just to name a few. Planning ahead is essential in game development, especially when things like multiplayer infrastructure have to be considered quite early. We went ahead and asked Pete about the primary goals for Enshrouded’s multiplayer infrastructure and how these influenced their decision to partner with GPORTAL.
“We decided from the very beginning to go with a peer to peer infrastructure to give players the biggest freedom on how and where to host their servers. We also knew we needed a partner who can support our players globally with reliable dedicated servers and the experience to get this easily managed.”
To achieve said goals, GPORTAL used proven techniques that should act as pillars in every project yet made them even more important in a project with this size and ambition:
1. Server Deployment: GPORTAL is strategically deploying servers across multiple data centers worldwide, ensuring that players from various regions could enjoy low-latency connections. This geographic diversity is essential for maintaining a smooth gameplay experience, particularly in a game like Enshrouded, where complex multiplayer interactions demand real-time responsiveness.
2. Server Management: Once the servers were live, GPORTAL took on the critical task of managing them continuously. This involved closely monitoring server performance, optimizing resources, and tweaking configurations based on real-time player activity. These proactive management efforts were and still are vital in keeping the game’s performance stable. By adjusting server settings on the fly, GPORTAL ensured a consistently smooth experience for players, even during peak times.
3. Maintenance and Support: GPORTAL’s role doesn’t stop at deployment and management; we also provide ongoing maintenance and support. This includes routine updates whenever new patches arrive, and quickly addressing any issues cropping up. Our responsive support is particularly important during the early access phase, where swift identification and resolution of server-related challenges help maintain a positive player experience. The close collaboration between GPORTAL and Keen Games usually allows for quick, effective solutions to any problems arising.
4. Scalability and Flexibility: A major strength of GPORTAL’s service is the ability to scale server resources as the game’s player base grows. As Enshrouded attracted more players, GPORTAL expanded the server infrastructure to accommodate the increased demand, preventing any lag or accessibility issues. This flexibility is essential for handling the unpredictable nature of an open-world survival game, where player numbers can surge unexpectedly.
However, not everything went along as smoothly as planned and shall be part of our next main topic. The points mentioned above still stand as our core solution and principles but game development and video game hosting doesn’t always happen in a vacuum.
3. Challenges
Launch Day came ─ and with it a series of problems. It turned out that, although things were meticulously planned for months, there is still room for improvements. Enshrouded went live, with nearly 29.000 servers hosted by GPORTAL, which was great news. However, little cracks were appearing on our otherwise polished facade. Prior to the launch, it became clear due to playtests on GPORTAL’s side that Enshrouded would be more demanding and resource heavy than initial checks suggested. As a result, more active machines were needed to accommodate the increased resource consumption. The main reason for this demand is that players can basically change everything in the world of Enshrouded. The more players there are, the more changes happen in the world, which means more data needs to be stored and managed.
To give a casual, real world analogy: Imagine a house that offers multiple apartments to accommodate guests, the house acting as a server machine and every apartment as a single slot on it. Initially you’d expect one host per flat so it’s possible to get many families into one house. However, if you didn’t correctly determine the size of each family, it might happen that they instead need more rooms to fit in, basically leaving less room for others. GPORTAL and Keen Games were focussed on what had to be done to mitigate said challenges.
Every challenge offers the opportunity to improve, basically turning a problem solved into a possible learning, and acknowledging the problem was our first step to prevent it from ever happening again. Our QA department has since then improved upon their playtesting process and documentation, as well as ironed out communication problems.
Another serious issue was the scarcity of servers, both on GPORTALs side and the video game hosting industry in general. The reason for this was a second, incredibly successful game launch in January 2024, namely Palworld. With its high follower and wishlist count before launch, much like Enshrouded, the question wasn’t if Palworld would be successful, but just how much it would exceed expectations. As anticipated, both games had incredibly strong launches. Unfortunately, the releases of Enshrouded and Palworld coincidentally were rather close, being in the time frame of four days, which led to a collision of interests.
Palworld’s success, despite the media attention it got pre-release, honestly dwarfed the expectations of press, media and hosters alike. GPORTALwas part of the big pool of Palworld game hosters, which became a double-edged sword. Going back to our earlier example, selling thousands of servers to Palworld, means more houses fully sold to a game that was not Enshrouded, leaving them and their player base with less and less possibilities to rent a room. This negatively impacts the launch of a game, especially if it’s an industry-wide problem, and put Keen Games at a disadvantage. A partnership means fulfilling a contract agreement, so GPORTAL had to provide enough houses ─ machines ─ for Enshrouded, which meant renting them ourselves and heightening our own costs. The situation has since then been solved but it was a result of the problems mentioned above and the equally high demand for Enshrouded and Palworld servers.
Being as open and transparent comes with a strong vulnerability but the reason for our choice was simply to be as professional as possible. It’s common, after projects like these, to pretend that everything went as planned, without any issues. However, a big part of professionality also comes from respect and honesty ─ and we owe it to our partners to show them our willingness to accept mistakes, learn from them together and put improvements into place that further strengthen us in future collaborations.
4. Process
Speaking of improvements, we asked Pete if he and his team put actions and solutions into place to further improve Enshrouded’s server performance and wanted to know more about the support our partnership brought to the project.
“Yes, we did,” was the clear answer. “We improved idle behavior, so the game server can sleep its threads more easily when nobody is playing. We also improved the threads scheduler for modern CPUs as well as improved internal thread dependencies and task batches. One last thing we did was reduce the memory usage for some of our components. There is much more we can and will do. Unfortunately, it’s always a matter of weighing where to allocate resources, so we constantly need to balance between adding game features/content and making technical improvements.”
Pete, if we’re talking about our partnership, which support coming from our (GPORTAL) side, was most notable?
“G-Portal provided us with several game servers we frequently use for testing. When there was a need for more servers with specific specs, these were provided as well. Apart from European servers, we were also granted access to servers in other parts of the world to further work on high-latency issues. When we needed to work with more different server branches and asked G-Portal to switch the Steam branches the servers were running on, they would quickly adjust the settings for us. This was very useful when we needed to test the update behavior before upcoming releases.“
While the team was working on new server settings options for the players, we worked very closely together. We provided G-Portal with a design and the first version of the new settings and they were able to provide a proper UI integration, so the users could comfortably use the new features as soon as the versions were released. We exchanged a lot of feedback during that time to make sure the expectations and in-game results matched.
When our test servers would not update or start, we could always reach out to the G-Portal staff in our internal chat tool and would receive answers very quickly. The staff would either force the servers to update faster or tell us if another issue caused the current problem. In case we were planning larger multiplayer sessions and needed support or more participants, we could reach out to G-Portal, so they could join the session.
G-Portal has also been very helpful when it came to the evaluation of user issues. We could always ask them, if specific server issues we received were also reported to their support team, to narrow down the source of the problems.“
5. Summary of Success
The partnership between Keen Games and GPORTAL was critical to the successful launch and operation of the servers for Enshrouded, though the journey wasn’t without its challenges. Both teams worked closely to bring the game to life, combining Keen Games‘ creative expertise with GPORTAL’s technical know-how. But as with any complex project, a few unexpected issues cropped up along the way.
Launch Day brought one of the first big tests. Despite months of meticulous planning and testing, Enshrouded turned out to be more demanding on resources than anyone had anticipated. Another challenge came from the near-simultaneous release of Enshrouded and Palworld, both of which were hosted by GPORTAL, which put Keen Games in a disadvantage. Challenging this specific problem took us longer than expected, taking a couple of weeks, but we stayed true to our initial commitments.
These difficulties, while tough at the moment, ultimately helped to strengthen the partnership. GPORTAL and Keen Games were open about the issues they faced and worked together to find solutions, as partners should. As a result, GPORTAL improved its testing processes and communication, making sure future launches would go more smoothly. Keen Games also gained valuable insights that will help in their future projects.
In the end, Enshrouded’s success is not just about what went right but also about how both teams handled the challenges that came up. The ability to adapt, learn, and improve from these experiences has set a strong foundation for ongoing success and future collaborations.
All we have to ask is: What does the future hold for Enshrouded?
“Oh, that’s a great question,” Pete answers. “We’re working hard to ensure that the journey with our players in Embervale continues. After delivering three updates since the launch into Early Access, which were all very well received by our community, we are now working on the next one. This is going to be a big one — the biggest so far — and we can’t wait to put it in the hands of our amazing players.”
