How Doge Studios Maintained 60fps for 1M+ Active Users with Custom Networking
Written by Adrian K., Founder & Lead Engineer at Codanum
The Context
Two weeks before "Meme City: Tycoon" was due to ship, Doge Studios ran a beta test that exposed a problem nobody had budgeted time for. The city-building sim's core design, thousands of concurrent dynamic entities interacting in real time, was bottlenecking standard networking and causing unplayable lag on mid-range phones.
The Challenge
The game required syncing over 10,000 active entities concurrently without dropping client frame rates below 60fps. Standard WebSocket or TCP solutions created significant network overhead, and Garbage Collection (GC) spikes in Unity were freezing the game state every few seconds. A failure at launch would lead to immediate uninstalls and disastrous app store ratings, effectively killing the game's viral momentum.
1M+
Active Users
60
FPS Target
The Solution
We engineered a custom UDP networking layer from scratch, tuned specifically for high-frequency state synchronization. Integrated with Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS), it bypassed traditional object-oriented overhead entirely. Delta compression and predictive client-side interpolation were layered on top, significantly reducing bandwidth requirements while maintaining deterministic game states across all connected players globally.
The Impact
At launch, the backend scaled cleanly to 1 million concurrent users without intervention. Mid-range mobile devices maintained 60fps throughout, and server uptime held at 99.9%. AWS GameLift scaling rules triggered efficiently, reducing projected server costs by 35%, with the architecture absorbing traffic spikes at 10× projected load without degradation.
"The custom UDP layer Codanum built didn't just save our launch. It completely redefined what we thought was possible for mobile multiplayer density. We went from freezing at 500 entities to pushing 10,000 flawlessly."
