Passionate gamers and community builders, Jonathan Yarbor and James Ross founded Nodecraft in 2012 to scratch an itch that was plaguing them and countless other gamers – reducing the barriers to creating game servers.
“Only about 2% of players will create a game server. A chronic lack of education available means that even the most technical of us have struggled to create a game server and often give up.
“Cost is also prohibitive. The average cost of a game server for a gamer is about $25 per month, when you’ve added the premium features that really make the process worth it. Then you add on the cost of big games themselves, which are around $30-40. Game servers become a point of friction which is placed on the customer,” said Jonathan Yarbor, co-founder and CEO of Nodecraft.
The Nodecraft team developed a ‘batteries included’ subscription service giving gamers unique control over their servers via their core product: Nodepanel. Gamers simply select the server resources they want to rent and play any game at any time.
“Our original goal for Nodecraft and the development of Nodepanel was to make the setting up of game servers a better and simpler process by acting as a third-party hosting provider. And that is where our relationship with servers.com began. But as we spent more time talking to game developers, we began to better understand that fixing the barriers around game servers couldn’t just be done from the player side, we needed to make it a more attractive investment for developers as well,” continued Jonathan.
This realisation led to a transition for the company over the last 18-24 months which culminated in the creation and launch of Nodecraft Studio at GDC in March 2024, where Nodecraft joined the servers.com booth as partners.
“Rather than game servers being a cost centre and distraction, they can become a revenue stream as players create new game servers to play with their family and friends.”
The player-owned game servers market has been around since the dawn of multiplayer games. And it continues to be a major market for players wanting to control their own world and provide a safe space, as well as content creators and gaming communities. The problem for game developers has been integrating game servers into their games in a way that doesn’t negatively impact their revenue. And this is where Jonathan and James saw an opportunity to make long-lasting change in the industry.
“A lot of games are created and after a while they fall off in terms of popularity. One of the ways of improving that is having some form of player-owned game servers, which let people play together and improve the longevity of the game. Since our foundation, we’ve supported that by going direct to consumer, which works well but it’s clunky and has very low conversion rates,” said James Ross, co-founder and CTO of Nodecraft.
“A consistent conversation we were having with people in the industry was that they would love to make a multiplayer game but couldn’t make it work financially. And that’s in large part because larger games have lots of different revenue streams that give them capacity to grow. So, we thought – we’re generating recurring revenue off those players that are creating game servers, what if we gave the game developer an opportunity to take a cut of that revenue?” said Jon.
“Our ability to totally lean on servers.com isn’t something we’ve had in the 12 years we’ve been in business. We’ve gone from combative relationships with previous bare metal providers to one where we know that the team has our back.”
Nodecraft Studio is a low-code integration that allows players to spin up servers directly in game and for the period of the time that they want to play.
“Rather than waiting for the consumer to discover Nodecraft once they’ve experienced the pain of trying to create their own server, we cut that off with a product that directly integrates into the game and the social platform that you’re playing on. We take on the lion’s share of the components that go into hosting, like card processing fees and customer support, and the developer gets a license for their servers and a percentage of the license revenue,” said Jon.
“We’re offering developers a direct revenue share. Rather than game servers being a cost centre and distraction, they can become a revenue stream as players create new game servers to play with their family and friends,” said James
Because Nodecraft Studio spins servers up in a ‘just in time’ model, Nodecraft don’t have the servers running 24/7, meaning they can cut down their server costs and pass those savings on to the consumer.
And the savings are substantial, as Jon explains - “we have to maintain a certain number of servers to handle the peak load but the cost per user is substantially lower – around $8 per month down from $25.”
So, where does the partnership between Nodecraft and servers.com come in?
Nodecraft’s original service as a game server hosting provider remains a core part of the business and servers.com is an important partner in delivering that service.
Yarbor explains, “the partnership Nodecraft has with servers.com lets us scale with game studios. The servers.com team deploys more servers and activates nodes faster than any other provider Nodecraft has ever worked with. Combined with the servers.com API, our team can automate complex network configuration - ensuring each gamer has their own dedicated IP.”
The close, trusted relationship that the two teams have built up over the years of working together has meant that Nodecraft hasn’t had to worry about the infrastructure side of things while they’ve made the transition into the B2B space.
“Our ability to totally lean on servers.com isn’t something we’ve had in the 12 years we’ve been in business. We’ve gone from combative relationships with previous bare metal providers to one where we know that the team has our back. It’s the small things that really make the difference. The ability to flag an issue on our shared Slack channel rather than going through the ticketing process. The team’s responsiveness to issues – with previous providers we felt like we had to prove that we had a problem before they would pick it up. The ability to chat to a real person not just a generic sales email or robot - when you're negotiating hardware upgrades or contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars with a single vendor, it balances the dynamics of the relationship into something more equitable and less fear-based. Our partnership at events. We have a partnership with servers.com that is far beyond that of just a vendor-customer,” said Jon.
James continues, “being able to talk to our account manager, all the way to C-level executives continues to give us unparalleled confidence in their product and service offerings”.
“Their support department is one of the best we've worked with, providing consistent and reliable updates, with expected ETAs and response times well above the industry standard. We're always confident when contacting their support that any issue will be resolved, which isn’t something we can say about some previous providers,” furthers Ross.
“The servers.com team is consistently open and transparent with us from every aspect of their business, including network, hardware, and support. This completely open working relationship allows us to grow and scale the business without worrying about hardware or networking.”
“The servers.com team have coordinated with us on several non-infrastructure projects when they didn't have to. When an issue comes up, they simply call-in backup, and someone else from their team joins our connected Slack channel,” continues Yarbor.
“Their support department is one of the best we've worked with, providing consistent and reliable updates, with expected ETAs and response times well above the industry standard.”
Initial conversations with game developers about Nodecraft Studio are positive and the Nodecraft team has a healthy pipeline of games that are interested in the product. Importantly, they’ve demonstrated to the industry that they are able to scale quickly and reliably. They were one of the few hosting providers that consistently ranked top when Palworld was released and didn’t run out of capacity. Key to that consistency is our work together.
“What’s next? I would say a continuation of the relationship that we have built together. We want to handle the player-created servers for the studios and hand over the backend infrastructure to servers.com. We know that servers.com is looking at expanding into new locations, which we’re excited about from a latency perspective for users. Ultimately, all boats rise on a high tide – as we work with more studios, we need more servers which helps Nodecraft and servers.com,” said Jonathan.
A big thank you to Jonathan and James for taking the time to chat to us about the next era of Nodecraft and for continuing to be a great customer to partner with.
To learn more about our hosting solutions for gaming, check out our industry page.
