How to Show Up for a Studio: Gray Zone Warfare and the Supporter Preview

The studio

Established in 2010, MADFINGER Games is a leading game developer based in the Czech Republic, known for Shadowgun Legends, Dead Trigger, and Gray Zone Warfare, their breakout PC title.

Platform

PC (Steam)

Game

Gray Zone Warfare

Genre

MMO Tactical FPS

When we last wrote about Gray Zone Warfare, MADFINGER had just launched in early access to a million copies sold and 72,000 peak CCU. The following year was one of perseverance and quiet dedication, the kind of work that doesn’t make headlines but makes a live game worth coming back to.

Spearhead, the latest expansion released on March 31, was the payoff from all that hard work. When it launched, every KPI moved: CCU, daily and monthly active users, sales, and average session length, all up.

This is the sequel to last year’s story where we’ll further explore not just what MADFINGER built, but who they built it with (spoiler: it’s us).

Gray Zone Warfare Spearhead expansion screenshot — Gray Zone Warfare's Spearhead expansion introduced new content and expanded its lush world

A Preview Worth Keeping

Alongside the Spearhead update, MADFINGER introduced the Supporter Preview. Players who bought the game’s Supporter Edition were given a full week of early access to Spearhead before it opened to everyone else, with one crucial difference from any preview they’d run before: progress made during that week would carry over to the live game at launch.

For that to work, player state had to transfer from the preview Nakama instance to production: characters, inventory, progression records, all of it. For a live MMO FPS on a timeline, that didn’t leave much margin.

Heroic Labs hosts MADFINGER’s database infrastructure, which meant this wasn’t a problem the studio could solve on its own. They brought the request to us, along with the timeline, the scope, and full transparency about the risk. We said yes.

Johanny Clerc-Renaud, Technical Director at MADFINGER Games

"I don't know why you guys said yes to this. Most companies probably would have said no, this is impossible. And you guys said yes." — Johanny Clerc-Renaud, Technical Director at MADFINGER Games

A Heroic Labs engineer worked tirelessly alongside MADFINGER’s systems lead for three weeks: designing, testing, and then running the migration. The real-time cutover ran into limits, and finishing the job required manually transferring the remaining records to make sure no player lost their progress. But it was worth it: every supporter who participated in the preview carried their progress into the live game.

"We managed to create a solution that did the job. It wasn't perfect technically, and we caused some trouble for ourselves and for you. But it fulfilled all the business needs we had." — Johanny Clerc-Renaud

Under the Hood

How the Migration Worked

The core challenge was moving player state from a preview Nakama instance into production at the exact moment Spearhead launched, without disrupting players active on either environment. Because Heroic hosts MADFINGER’s database infrastructure, this wasn’t something the studio could run independently. We worked with MADFINGER’s online systems lead to design and execute the migration together.

Two Nakama instances: Preview and production ran in parallel, which meant player state couldn’t simply be shared, it had to be actively migrated at the exact moment the update went live.
Nakama Storage Engine: The system of record for all character data, inventory, and progression in Gray Zone Warfare. If anything was missing, players would notice.
Migration pipeline: Built to transfer player records from preview to production at cutover in real time, so that supporters arriving at the live game would find their progress already there.
Fallback: When the real-time path hit limits, Heroic and MADFINGER coordinated to transfer the remaining records manually; no player lost progress.
Next iteration: More lead time, a more robust sync architecture, and better cutover monitoring.

The Payoff

The Supporter Preview moved sales. But the more interesting result was what happened in the community. Even players who didn’t buy the Supporter Edition responded positively, and that’s a harder thing to engineer than a conversion.

"Players said: those guys paid more, they deserve to get in earlier. That's fair. We saw so many messages from day-one supporters saying, I'm so proud I bought this game. I always believed in them." — Johanny Clerc-Renaud

Gray Zone Warfare Spearhead launch metrics from the first week — Spearhead's first week: every KPI moved in the right direction

In a space where monetisation decisions are scrutinised closely, the Supporter Preview landed as something players felt good about. The business case and the community goodwill reinforced each other rather than working against each other, which is exactly how it should go in this industry.

"Not many online games allow you to play a preview and keep your progress. With this, we're probably setting a new standard. I think other studios will look at it and be inspired." — Johanny Clerc-Renaud

Getting there required a partner willing to take on an ambitious problem with a tight deadline and see it through. On that: “Both in terms of hard skills and soft skills, the Heroic Labs guys are at the peak. It’s so nice to work with them.”

Heroic Cloud