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Picture this. It’s launch day for the latest season of your favorite game, and your newborn just went down for a nap. You’ve got five or ten minutes to get a game in and load up the web shop to top-up on gold. Then checkout won’t load. You refresh. Still nothing.
You don’t have time to troubleshoot checkout errors, and the moment passes. The baby’s awake.
Too many players face this reality during high-traffic events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, character releases, or season resets. When payment partners fail to adapt to player demand and scale quickly, players leave your web shop empty handed, creating dissatisfaction that could have been prevented.
Publishers and developers need a payments partner built specifically to scale with player demand, ensuring reliable transactions and uninterrupted revenue — even during the most intense spikes in player demand.
Below, we’ll cover:
- Why scalability is important for video games and D2C.
- How FastSpring approaches scalability.
- Why our scalability approach is different.
- How FastSpring handled scalability for gaming customers during Cyber Weekend 2024.
Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games: FastSpring is a payments partner you can trust for your players and which you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts. We empower you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and more. To learn more about how FastSpring supports publishers and developers, visit fastspring.gg.
Why Scalability Is Important for Video Games and D2C
Publishers without a scalable payment processing platform risk checkout failures, slow load times, and — ultimately — lost player confidence and sales.
When checkouts fail, you miss out on revenue. Slow purchases and delays frustrate players and may even reduce future conversions. And negative experiences during checkout and payment processes can damage your brand’s reputation and negatively impact player retention.
That’s why it’s vital for game developers to choose a payment solution that can scale at a moment’s notice — a platform that solves for:
- Infrastructure that expands dynamically in response to traffic spikes.
- Predictive planning to anticipate peak demand.
- Real-time adjustments to prevent checkout failures before they happen.
How FastSpring Approaches Scalability
FastSpring’s platform is built from the ground up with scalability in mind — it’s built into everything we do.
Ahead of your major sales events, FastSpring can expand server capacity, ensuring traffic surges never impact performance. And we prepare proactively, so game developers never have to worry about last-minute slowdowns.
Even at peak demand, FastSpring systems use only a fraction of our total capacity (our system aims for handling 10x peak load). That means less disruptions, fewer delays, and a checkout experience that performs flawlessly, regardless of player traffic.
Tailored Scaling for Your Unique Game
At FastSpring, we know that every game is different. Some see regular and predictable seasonal spikes, while others may experience sudden, less predictable surges related to new character drops or limited-time sales. To handle that, FastSpring scales infrastructure informed by each game’s unique needs, based on season resets, character releases, planned sales, new game launches, and more.
Our team partners with you to help forecast demand spikes and proactively prepare our infrastructure accordingly. Whether it’s a planned event or an unexpected surge, FastSpring adjusts in real time to maintain a seamless purchase experience for your players.
Real-Time Responsiveness
Of course, not every sales surge is a planned or predictable one. That’s why scalability is about more than just adding infrastructure — it also requires the ability to stay ahead of potential issues and respond in real-time when they arise. FastSpring continuously monitors transaction flow via machine learning models that are under the oversight of an enterprise-grade team of infrastructure and payments experts.
We can identify and respond to any anomalies before they have a chance to impact the player experience or your revenue flow.
With AWS elasticity and real-time observability, FastSpring can make adjustments and scale instantly, ensuring uninterrupted transactions — no matter how many players are buying.
Why FastSpring’s Scalability Approach Is Different
At Fastpring, we recognize that every game is unique. They vary in genre, player demographics, live ops cadence, and so much more — and that means revenue spikes and demand spikes are unique, too.
We partner closely with publishers throughout the year to anticipate demand fluctuations across their games. We review expected spikes — such as season resets, character drops, or regional promotions — and align our infrastructure plans accordingly. This means that we coordinate directly with publishers on timing and projected volume and then build plans that match, to ensure that player transactions can continue without disruption even when traffic surges.
At a platform level, we aim to operate with 10x headroom above average peak load. That capacity buffer allows us to handle sudden increases in player traffic without the need for reconfiguration. We combine this with real-time observability and a proactive alerting system to always maintain low-latency performance, even under extreme load. This approach eliminates bottlenecks, prevents degraded player experiences, and supports stable revenue flow through our publishers’ web shops.
Moreover, we have an enterprise-grade engineering team that has built and maintains a scalable and resilient cloud-native stack using AWS. That includes autoscaling, redundancy, and failover capabilities across regions.
To ensure that our payment services are operational during peak load, we maintain infrastructure capable of high-throughput performance. This includes strategies such as provisioning high-IOPS database instances, tuning I/O subsystems, and ensuring we have the correct connection configurations to support increased payment requests during transaction spikes.
FastSpring Is Your Partner for Scalability
At FastSpring, scalability isn’t just about infrastructure — it’s about delivering consistent, reliable experiences that players trust. We ensure your checkout is fast, seamless, and responsive, even under extreme load. That kind of reliability protects both your revenue and your relationship with players, reinforcing trust every time they return to buy.
For our publishers, we go further. Our team works closely with yours to anticipate traffic spikes, configure infrastructure and fraud settings, and validate performance ahead of major moments. You don’t need to monitor systems or resolve issues mid-launch — we handle the technical complexity of payments, so you can focus on your game. With our purpose-built approach to scale, observability, and risk management, we help you capture more player revenue and deliver dependable purchase experiences that keep players coming back.
How FastSpring Served Gaming Customers During Cyber Weekend 2024
Our strategy for dynamic scalability boils down to proactive communication, rigorous execution, and thoughtful iteration.
Let’s take a look at how this allowed us to maximize Cyber Weekend 2024 for our gaming customers — with thorough, proactive capacity planning and risk management.
The Preparations
We began preparing for Cyber Weekend in September. With our base principle of being able to support 10x current peak traffic at any time, we reinforced our infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted service during one of the busiest commerce weekends of the year.
We further prepared with our publisher partners so we could understand their expectations for Cyber Weekend, what sales they planned to run, if they had any releases coming up, etc. This — combined with our real-time monitoring tools, hundreds of automated alerts, and anomaly detection — ensured that payment uptime wouldn’t be impacted by any amount of volume surge.
The Execution
In parallel, we ran a 24/7 live operations internal team to coordinate engineering, payments, and client communications.
Plus, publishers using FastSpring were using our game-specific risk models that evaluate transaction behavior using the customer’s own historical data.
These bespoke models drastically improved approval rates, reduced false declines, and eliminated common risk model issues such as repeat buyers being flagged incorrectly. In several markets, we saw measurable increases in successful transaction completion rates.
The Result
Our systems stayed well below critical load thresholds, with headroom to support 20x the actual buyer traffic during Cyber Weekend.
In other words? A frictionless payment experience for players, even at global peak scale.
Whether it’s a major holiday like Cyber Weekend, a bespoke event, or a simple surge in traffic, we ensure both our payments and checkout infrastructure are always ready to address your game’s unique needs.
We work directly with publishers to proactively plan for events or other expected changes in player purchase behavior — even with very little notice — and adapt both our payments and checkout infrastructure and risk model to adapt to your unique needs.
Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games: FastSpring is a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and more. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.
