GoKawiilIndie studio's decade-old backend ran seven games on 11 platforms for €10-50/month
A solo developer built a game backend called GDT (Game Development Toolkit) that has run every title they've shipped since 2016, including Marooners, Verdun, Tannenberg, Isonzo, Crash Drive 2 and 3, plus a seventh game built by another studio. The PHP version, roughly 20,000 lines running on Google App Engine with Firestore, supported Steam, Epic, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, mobile and web without a player-noticed outage in ten years, and has now been replaced by a C# version on Cloud Run.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The low hosting cost and single-developer maintenance suggest that simple, unglamorous infrastructure choices can outlast flashier rewrites, especially for small studios without dedicated backend teams. The developer's account implies that betting on a stable, boring stack (PHP, App Engine) rather than chasing newer tools may have reduced long-term operational risk across many game launches. It also highlights how invisible infrastructure work underpins visible product success, even though players and reviewers never see it.
- One backend served seven games across 11 platforms since 2016 with no player-noticed outage.
- Combined hosting costs stayed between €10 and €50 a month for all titles.
- The original PHP system has been replaced by a new C# version running on Google Cloud Run since September 2026.
Source: m2h.nl — Mike Hergaarden, 2026-09-22
Published there as: “The backend that ran every game we made, ten years and counting”
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