Building scalable, cost-effective real-time multiplayer games with Azure Web PubSub

Modern multiplayer games demand more than fast servers - they require persistent, reliable, low-latency communication at massive scale, often under highly unpredictable traffic patterns. Launch days, seasonal events, and promotions can generate connection spikes that dwarf steady-state traffic, while players still expect real-time responsiveness and stability. In this post, we’ll explore how a game studio building a large-scale online RPG addressed these challenges using Azure Web PubSub, and what lessons other game developers can apply when designing their own real-time backend architectures.

THE CHALLENGE: From polling to real-TIME MULTIPLAYER The studio began with a backend architecture that relied heavily on polling a centralized data store to synchronize multiplayer state - such as party invitations, friend presence, and session updates - across geographically distributed game servers. Small timing and synchronization issues are immediately visible to players.” The team needed a solution that could: * Maintain persistent connections at scale * Deliver near real-time updates without polling * Handle spiky traffic patterns without over-provisioning * Minimize operational complexity WHY A MANAGED REAL-TIME SERVICE. The initial instinct was to build a custom WebSocket infrastructure in-house.

But persistent connections, failover, reconnection logic, scaling behavior, and regional distribution quickly added up to a large and risky engineering effort..