How Phoenix Labs used Google Cloud to handle multiplayer demand for Dauntless

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
January 15, 2020
Updated June 17, 2025
5 min

When Phoenix Labs launched the co-op monster-hunting game Dauntless, it wasn’t alone. It had the virtually unlimited server capacity of Google Cloud behind it.

That was important because Dauntless was a free-to-play game, one that invited any and all gamers around the world, on game platforms as diverse as the Windows PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. When it went live in May, it had to accommodate all players. And when it went live on the Epic Games Store on May 21, it scored four million players in a week. Now it has scaled to more than 16 million.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.