Scaling a game server is one of the most challenging and important engineering problems in online multiplayer development.
When your game goes from 100 players → 10,000 → 1 million, everything must scale:

• Game servers
• World simulation
• Databases
• Matchmaking
• Social systems
• Event processing
• Persistence
• Analytics
• And your infrastructure cost

This chapter teaches the foundational techniques used by real-world online games to scale reliably and efficiently.

1. Why Scaling Matters

Players expect: