GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Building, Scaling, and Maintaining 'Sea of Thieves' Live Services
Matt Cavanagh (Lead of Live Services, Rare Ltd)
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Programming
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: All
Dive into the complex Azure cloud infrastructure that powers Sea of Thieves, a AAA live service game with over 40 million players served by a web of microservices dealing with hundreds of billions of requests per month. In this session, we'll explore the architecture of a large-scale live service stack, focusing on resilient systems design and challenges we've faced along our journey. Learn about strategies we have for handling large releases and mitigating incidents, plus gain insights into our data management techniques, including aging out data to cheaper storage while maintaining player progress. Finally, discover our approach migrating large amounts of data in an environment that is almost-always online.
Takeaway
Attendees will gain practical insights into our approach to managing large-scale cloud infrastructure for live service games. They will learn about resilient system design, innovative scaling techniques, efficient data storage solutions, and handling live data migrations, all through the real-world case study of Sea of Thieves.
Intended Audience
Anyone interested in systems architecture. While it will touch on specific technologies (mostly the Microsoft tech stack), the content will largely be around broad, understandable problems.