One developer built a backend that ran seven games for ten years on €10–50 a month
The backend that ran every game we made, ten years and counting
Mike Hergaarden built the Game Development Toolkit, a PHP backend on Google App Engine and Firestore, to support seven games across eleven platforms for a decade. It handles crash reports, cloud auth, remote config, and more, all for €10–50 monthly. Now replaced by C#, it ran without a player-visible outage, proving that simplicity and a single developer can outlast complex alternatives.
Our hosting bill for all of those games together was between 10 and 50 euros a month, depending on how many people were playing, most of them in the free mobile games. If nobody played, it would cost nothing.
- flohofwoe
It's a good thing to have the "this post was AI generated" signal in the first sentence, saves a lot of time ;)
(although tbh, I'm starting to wonder if people subconsciously warp their own writing style when they stare at Claude output all day)
- heyjstn
I'm tired of reading the Claude-ish generated visualizations, it's fine that you're using AI to write the post but at least please trying to polishing the article if you really care
- stevoski
> I want to build a feature in the morning and have it live in the afternoon, and anything that gets in the way of that has to go.
Love this!
The philosophy behind how the author runs his app is very much like mine - go for simple, proven tech that you know really well.
(For the people dismissing the article because AI, you are missing out on a good read.)