Hosting Long-Running Game Servers: Challenges and Solutions

If you’re building an MMO, survival, or sandbox game, you know the servers behind those worlds aren’t spinning up for a 20-minute match and then disappearing.

They’re running for weeks or even months without interruption which creates a different set of challenges from short session based games:

• Managing costs for always-on servers
• Rolling out patches without wiping progress
• Delivering a stable experience players can count on
• Keeping the world and player data safe when crashes happen

This is the reality of long-running servers. AccelByte Multiplayer Servers (AMS) and Storage Services help take the pain out of running them with the orchestration tools devs need to keep persistent worlds alive and cost-effective.

Long-Running Servers vs Session-Based

Not all games have the same server needs. Fast-paced shooters and battle royales depend on short-lived sessions that scale up and down constantly. MMOs and survival games, on the other hand, need stability above all else. Here’s how they compare:

AMS supports both models, so you don’t need two different toolchains as your game evolves.

The Hard Part: Persistence

With session-based games, servers are disposable. When the match ends, the server shuts down and is no longer needed. But with persistent worlds, the server is the game. That means:

• World and player data need to survive crashes and restarts
• Patches and updates can’t erase progress
• Servers need to pick up right where they left off

A typical workflow looks like this:

With the AccelByte SDK integrated into your dedicated server, you can run it in AMS and use AccelByte’s storage services for persistence. This lets you save and reload world state reliably without bolting together your own storage system on S3, Azure, or GCP.

Running Long-Lived Servers with AccelByte

1. Session Timeout Resets

AMS has a watchdog that shuts down servers if they get stuck past a set timeout. That’s great for short matches, but persistent servers need to stay up for months. The fix is simple: your server just signals AMS to reset or extend the timeout, keeping it alive as long as it’s needed.

2. Flexible Server Claiming

There’s more than one way to connect players to long-running servers:

Using AGS Session

• Create a persistent session with a world ID.
• The session claims a server from AMS.
• The server regularly saves world state to the cloud using the world ID.
• On crash or after stopping for an update, the session claims a new server which loads the cloud save.
• Clients can query for existing sessions to discover and join worlds.

Using a Custom Extend Service

If AGS Sessions don’t fit your game, you can bypass them entirely using Extend. Claim servers directly and control how worlds are created, discovered, and managed. Either way, AMS provides the orchestration backbone however you decide to wire it into game.

Reducing Costs for Persistent Fleets

Running long-lived servers around the clock adds up quickly if you’re only on cloud VMs. The predictable nature of persistent fleets makes them perfect for bare metal hosting, which saves money in the long run. With AMS, moving to bare metal is easy:

• Start on cloud instances while testing and scaling.
• Shift stable baseline fleets to bare metal for savings.
• Run a hybrid setup: bare metal for steady load, cloud for bursts.

📌 Real-world example: AEXLAB cut 46% off their server costs with a hybrid setup, while also increasing dedicated server density per machine.

Why Choose AMS for Persistent Worlds

MMOs and survival games bring persistence challenges, but the hardest orchestration problem is actually rapid scaling for short-lived sessions. AMS was built to solve that first so supporting long-running servers comes naturally. With AMS you get:

• Unified orchestration for both session-based and persistent servers
• Reliable persistence using AccelByte storage services
• Cost savings from seamless cloud ↔ bare metal transitions
• Built-in observability to monitor health and performance
• Flexible integration with AGS Sessions or custom Extend services
  

FAQs

How do MMOs handle persistent servers?

By keeping dedicated servers running continuously and saving world/player data to persistent storage so it can be restored after restarts.

What’s the best way to save the world state in a multiplayer game?

Use a unique world ID and integrate with cloud save or a database to persist world and player data regularly.

When should I use bare metal vs. cloud servers?

Use cloud servers when your workload is highly dynamic or unpredictable. Use bare metal when you have a stable, long-running fleet, it’s cheaper at scale.