The Company

An American video game developer with a storied history going back over 20 years, known for an iconic video game series, developing a new, always-online co-op zombie shooter needing continuous infrastructure monitoring to support a large, active player base.

The Challenge

Always-online games demand server stability and low latency. The developers knew that the success of their game would depend on a strong, reliable operations team that could monitor their game 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but didn’t want to burden their developers and engineers with on-call duties, which would lead to on-call fatigue and reduce their capacity to develop additional content for their game. The studio needed a trusted partner to help carry the load.

Zumidian’s Role

In mid-2021, Zumidian stepped in to provide full-spectrum operational monitoring and off-hours support. We became an extension of the studio’s live operations team, proactively monitoring infrastructure and triaging alerts, especially during non-business hours.

Key services delivered:

• 24/7 Monitoring & Alerting: Using Grafana and integrated monitoring stacks to catch anomalies before they become outages.

• Smart Alerting: Implementation and tuning of alert thresholds to reduce noise and ensure relevant escalations.

• After-Hours Incident Triage: First-line response to alerts, with escalation protocols tailored to client needs.

• Engineer On-Call Relief: Dramatic reduction in overnight disruptions for the client’s engineering team.

Results & Impact

• Minimized Downtime: Infrastructure incidents are identified and acted on faster, often before players are affected.

• Improved Team Wellbeing: Internal engineers experience significantly less on-call fatigue.

• Increased Focus: The studio’s development team can focus on game improvements and content updates, knowing operational support is covered.

How We Work

Zumidian operates as a seamless part of each client’s ecosystem. For this title, we integrated with existing tools and workflows, aligned our protocols with the studio’s priorities, and provided consistent, reliable off-hours coverage.

The Takeaway

Launching and maintaining a live game is hard. Keeping it running 24/7 without burning out your engineers is even harder. With Zumidian, studios get a dedicated operational partner that ensures stability, supports internal teams, and keeps the player experience front and center—no matter the hour.