It’s no surprise that game server scaling is usually done by proprietary software—most orchestration and scaling systems simply aren’t built for this kind of workload.
Many of the popular fast-paced online multiplayer games such as competitive FPSs, MMOs and MOBAs require a dedicated game server—a full simulation of the game world—for players to connect to as they play within it. This dedicated game server is usually hosted somewhere on the internet to facilitate synchronizing the state of the game between players, but also to be the arbiter of truth for each client playing the game, which also has the benefit of safeguarding against players cheating.
Dedicated game servers are stateful applications that retain the full game simulation in memory. But unlike other stateful applications, such as databases, they have a short lifetime. Rather than running for months or years, a dedicated game server runs for a few minutes or hours.
Dedicated game servers also need a direct connection to a running game server process’ hosting IP and port, rather than relying on load balancers.
Read more at Google Blog
