When to Build Your Own Game Backend

Let me deal with the elephant in the room first. I lead product and sales at a games infrastructure vendor, so an article from me about build versus buy starts with a credibility deficit, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. So I am not going to argue the buy case. Plenty has been written on it, including a recent piece on Deconstructor of Fun, and you can guess where my incentives point.

Instead I want to write down the test we actually use when a studio asks us whether they should build, because after nearly a decade of representing Heroic Labs, the conversations I am proudest of are the ones that ended with “you should build this yourselves.”

That is not generosity. A customer who should have built and bought anyway becomes an unhappy customer, and unhappy customers cost more than lost deals. So we qualify hard, in both directions.

Without further ado, here’s the test. Just six questions, and I would encourage teams to answer them before any vendor is in the room.

The six questions

One: do you have the time?

I am putting this first because it is the question studios most often get wrong, and the one with the least forgiving consequences. Teams come to us with timelines that were set by a publisher date or a marketing beat rather than by the work, and when the timeline and the build collide, the build loses. Sometimes that means delaying the title. More often it means shipping a half-finished implementation which rarely bodes well.

What that half-finished version of a backend looks like is specific and I have watched it happen more than once. It works beautifully for five hundred concurrent users. Then the game does well, fifty thousand players arrive, and the dream turns into a tragedy. The database access patterns that were fine at small scale, the flows that were never load-tested, the operational tooling nobody had time to build. The failure arrives on your best day, during the traffic spike you spent your entire marketing budget on. And you cannot fix architecture under that kind of pressure. You can only survive it and rebuild afterwards, which is the most expensive version of this decision there is.

So answer honestly: does your schedule have room for the backend to take longer than planned? If you have a strict deadline, that will make the decision for you.

Two: is the backend part of what makes your game different?

Not important to the game. Different. If your core loop depends on server logic that does not exist elsewhere, a novel simulation, custom netcode, a mechanic that is the game, then that system is your product and you should own it completely.

Nobody should outsource their differentiation. But be precise about the boundary. The custom simulation may be yours alone; the authentication, matchmaking and leaderboards around it are the same systems every game needs, and building those buys you no difference anyone can feel.

Three: would an existing stack force real compromise?

Sometimes requirements are unusual enough that fitting a commercial platform means bending the game around the tool. That is a legitimate build trigger. The check is to name the compromise specifically. “We need flexibility” is less of a requirement and more of a feeling. “We need deterministic rollback across regions and no available stack supports it” is a requirement, and if you can write yours down that concretely, you may have a build case.

Four: do you have a standing team for it, or a borrowed one?

A backend built by game engineers between projects is an unowned system from day one. Passing this question means dedicated backend engineers whose permanent job is this system, sized not for the build but for the decade after it. Make sure to have an honest answer for what happens when the person who designed it leaves. If the plan is that the team disbands back into the game after launch, you have already failed this question, whatever the launch looks like.

Five: can you carry it for the life of the game?

The build is the cheapest part of owning a backend. Platforms shift, security issues surface, requirements arrive that nobody scoped, and all of it lands on external deadlines you do not control. Passing this question means budgeting the system as a permanent product with a permanent owner, not as a project that ends. If your finance model shows backend investment dropping to near zero after launch, the model is describing a system that will decay.

Six: can your schedule absorb the hardening?

The distance between a backend that passes a demo and one that survives real players at scale is measured in months, and those months are only visible in hindsight. AI tooling has genuinely compressed the first part, the working version. It has not compressed the second, because judging whether generated code is production-grade requires the production experience the team does not have yet. If your launch window cannot absorb that uncertainty, timing alone may decide this question for you.

Reading your answers

Six yeses is a build. I mean that without reservation. Studios that pass this test build backends that become real assets, and some of the best engineering in this industry lives inside them. If that is you, you do not need us, and I would rather tell you that in the first meeting than discover it together in year two.

Anything less than six, and the honest move is to name the failed question out loud, because that question is where the money goes. Most studios I meet fail on questions four and five, team and permanence, and those failures show up two years in, as a system nobody owns and everybody depends on shows dangerous cracks. That’s also when we’re called back to fix the cracks and rebuild the system under severe time pressure.

If you want to put actual numbers against it, Deconstructor of Fun built a Total Cost of Ownership calculator that compares the paths using your own team size and salaries. Run it before you decide, whatever you decide.

And if your answers land you on the buy side, talk to us, or frankly to any of the serious vendors. The test does not care whose backend you end up choosing.