A Heroic Ten Years

Ten years ago, three friends took the kind of leap that can only be made with equal parts ambition, naivety, and blind faith.

Over a decade later, one million developers have used the technology we have created. Games built on this tech have been installed over 600 million times and have generated nearly $4 billion in revenue. I feel equally proud and thankful for the impact we’ve had on the industry we love.

Despite this wild success, my co-founders, Mo, Andrei, and I had a simple start. We met at the University of London’s Queen Mary College, and soon became close friends. After graduation, we secured jobs as server engineers at various companies, but we would regularly meet up on weekends. Like many aspiring game developers, we’d play games together and talk about our dreams to one day set up our own studio.

For years, it was just talk, until one day, it wasn’t.

We originally set out to build a game studio. But working in infrastructure, I kept seeing the same thing: developers wasting time and resources rebuilding backend tech that should have already existed. Matchmaking. Leaderboards. Social features. Why were studios reinventing the wheel?

That question lit the spark. Our first pivot came quickly. We moved away from the idea of making games and instead focused on what we’ve become best at today: solving problems for developers who create tomorrow’s hit games.

That’s how our first product, Nakama, a social competitive and real-time backend technology, was born.

From Dreamers to Founders

“Nakama” (仲間) is a Japanese word that means friends as close as family. Fitting, given our origin story and our goal to power the next generation of social, competitive, and real-time games.

We spent our nights and weekends prototyping the core of Nakama. By mid-2014, we quit our jobs, pooled whatever savings we had, and went all in. That’s when Heroic Labs was officially born.

Why “Heroic”? Because we saw the studios we wanted to serve as heroes in their own right, fighting battles against technical complexity, time pressure, and scalability. Our job was to equip them with the right tools for the journey.

In 2015, we took a shot in the dark and applied to Y Combinator. To our excitement, we got in.

We were one of over 20,000 companies that applied. Looking back at our pitch video now, I honestly have no idea why they said yes. But they did. Demo Day gave us a critical boost. We were told: “This is a no-brainer. The industry needs this.” But also: “There’s a graveyard of companies that’ve tried and failed. Don’t join them.”

It was both validating and sobering.

From SaaS to Open Source: Our Boldest Bet

Early on, we operated as a SaaS developer tools company. But the economics didn’t work.

If one customer scaled, they consumed a large amount of our server resources. Something that we knew as the “noisy neighbor” problem. And the harsh reality of Software as a Service meant we had to offer a free tier, which our paying customers necessarily subsidize. A classic problem with SaaS developer technology.

So, we made what felt like an insane decision at the time: we open-sourced Nakama.

It was terrifying, I’ll admit. But it aligned perfectly with our mission: empower developers, don’t gatekeep them.

We gave studios the option to run Nakama on their infrastructure. No noisy neighbors. No free tier headaches. Just scalable, enterprise-grade tech, available to everyone.

We launched Nakama Open Source in 2017, and overnight, adoption exploded.

Usage isn’t revenue. Games take years to launch. And for a while, we found ourselves asking: Did we just give away our future by making our product open-source?

Snap, Survival, and the Turnaround

Then came the moment that changed everything.

A major studio CTO contacted us after discovering Nakama on GitHub. They were stuck with a failing backend provider and asked us to help them migrate.

Then lightning struck again. An unexpected warm introduction from a customer, we received a message from Snap (known as Snapchat at the time). Within days, Chris and Mo were on a flight to Brisbane to migrate their entire games platform, with Andrei remote in the UK. Together, we worked around the clock to complete the task at hand.

That moment confirmed it. We were building the right thing.

In 2018, we launched Heroic Cloud. Studios now could scale, failover, and upgrade without splitting their player base. We’d found our stride.

Two years later, Amazon announced it was shutting down its acquired GameTech service. Within months, we migrated 95% of their clients; all of a sudden became the de facto backend provider in games. It was a sublime moment.

As with all “overnight” successes, it took a while to get there. Six years, a radical pivot in business model, a couple of close calls, and – of course – some luck – but we had finally made it.

To better support game teams, we built Hiro, a configurable metagame framework. And Satori, our unified LiveOps platform for events, messaging, feature flags, and experimentation.

Today, we’re not just the “backend people” anymore. We’re the partner powering some of the most successful live games in the world, used by indie teams and billion-dollar giants alike.

But our greatest achievement? Staying true to the mission. Heroic Labs was built by developers, for developers. We’re not here to extract value, we’re here to create it.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Games (and Our Place in It)

Our first ten years were about building infrastructure for a generation of developers wanting to make ambitious online and social games. This isn’t going to change, but it’s our belief that what creators are going to make in Heroic’s second decade is going to evolve to be even more connected, intelligent, and alive; and we are going to be there to support the studios making these experiences.

We believe the future of games isn’t just about better graphics or faster servers. It’s about deeper systems that respond to players in real time. Games that learn, adapt, and evolve. Worlds that feel alive, not just reactive.

The games of tomorrow won’t be built on yesterday’s assumptions. And they won’t be built alone.

They’ll be built by creators empowered by tools that remove friction, not add to it. By teams who can move fast without breaking things. By studios that partner with platforms that understand not just how games work but why they succeed.

It also means helping smaller teams punch above their weight. We’ve always believed that a solo developer should be able to build something that rivals the scale of a more established studio.

To sum it up, we’re not just building software, we’re building leverage. And we’re just getting started.

(P.S. ​Join Heroic for our 10 year anniversary party at Gamescom! Click here to RSVP)