Game Studios
Protect your game launch
from day one.
Multiplayer launches are DDoS magnets. Angry competitors, booter-service kids, and extortion crews all know that launch-week downtime kills reviews, spikes refund rates, and erodes player trust permanently. Flowtriq gives indie and mid-tier studios the same real-time detection that AAA publishers get from Akamai and Arbor, at a fraction of the cost.
The Problem
You spent years building the game. A DDoS attack can destroy launch day in minutes.
Game studios invest thousands of hours and millions of dollars building multiplayer experiences. But the moment you announce a launch date, you become a target. Booter services sell UDP flood attacks for $10. Competitors pay for disruption. Disgruntled beta testers leak server IPs. A single sustained attack during your launch window can tank your Steam reviews, trigger mass refunds, and dominate your Reddit with "servers down again" posts.
Big publishers solve this with six-figure Akamai Prolexic or Arbor Sightline contracts. But if you're an indie studio, a mid-tier publisher, or a team self-hosting dedicated servers, that pricing is out of reach. You end up with no DDoS visibility at all, reacting to player complaints instead of detecting attacks.
Flowtriq closes that gap. Install the agent on every game server in two commands. Get sub-second detection, automatic attack classification, and PCAP forensics, all for $9.99 per node per month. Annual billing drops that to $7.99.
Whether you're running Unreal Dedicated Server instances, a custom game server in C++, or containerized microservices behind a matchmaker, Flowtriq monitors the network layer underneath with zero changes to your game code.
| Average DDoS attack cost | $40,000/hour (Corero) |
| Gaming industry share | #1 most targeted sector |
| Booter service cost | $10-30 for a 30min flood |
| Steam review recovery | Months to years |
| Enterprise DDoS solutions | $50,000-250,000/year |
| Flowtriq (20 nodes) | $2,400/year |
Launch Day Scenario
Two timelines. Same attack. Different outcomes.
Your game launches at 10:00 AM. Players flood in. By 10:14 AM, someone launches a volumetric UDP flood against your US-East game servers. Here's what happens next.
Without DDoS detection, your team finds out from angry players on social media. By the time you've SSH'd into the server and run iftop, the damage is done. With Flowtriq, the attack is detected, classified, and alerted before most players even notice a hiccup.
10:08 PPS=4,200 · healthy player traffic
10:12 PPS=6,800 · peak concurrent rising
10:14 PPS=89,400 · UDP FLOOD DETECTED
── Without Flowtriq ──
10:14 Players disconnecting en masse
10:16 Matchmaking queue times spiking
10:18 "Servers down" tweets trending
10:22 First negative Steam reviews posted
10:25 Team notices from Discord reports
10:32 SSH'd in, running iftop manually
10:40 Identified as DDoS, not a bug
10:55 Null-routing IP, players long gone
11:10 Reddit post: "DOA" — 2.4k upvotes
── With Flowtriq ──
10:14:01 Attack detected · <1s
10:14:01 Classified: UDP Flood · 96%
10:14:01 PCAP capture started
10:14:02 Alerts: Slack + PagerDuty
10:14:03 Auto-mitigation rule triggered
10:14:08 Flood traffic dropping
10:15 Players reconnecting normally
10:16 Incident report auto-generated
How It Works
Three steps to protect your game servers
No network changes, no BGP sessions, no GRE tunnels. Just install and go.
1. Install the FTAgent
Two commands on any Linux server. The agent is a lightweight binary with no dependencies. It runs alongside your game server with near-zero CPU overhead. Works on bare metal, cloud VMs, or containers. No kernel module, no firewall rules, no network changes.
2. Baselines build automatically
Within minutes, Flowtriq starts learning your normal traffic patterns. It builds per-node baselines for PPS, BPS, and protocol distribution. Dynamic thresholds adjust automatically as your player count grows. No manual tuning required, though you can override thresholds if needed.
3. Attacks are detected and handled
When traffic crosses the threshold, the agent detects it in under one second. It classifies the attack type, starts PCAP capture, fires alerts to your configured channels, and triggers the auto-mitigation chain — local firewall rules first, then BGP FlowSpec and cloud scrubbing if the attack escalates. Your team gets a full incident report with forensic evidence.
4. Review and report
After each incident, review the full timeline in your dashboard. Download PCAP captures for forensic analysis. Generate PDF reports for your publisher or hosting provider. Use the evidence for abuse reports and takedown requests against attack sources.
Gaming-Specific Threats
The attacks your game servers actually face
Gaming infrastructure faces a unique threat landscape. Unlike web servers that sit behind CDNs and reverse proxies, game servers need low-latency direct connections to deliver real-time gameplay. Players connect directly to your server IPs. That means game servers are exposed by design, and there's no CDN to absorb volumetric traffic before it reaches you.
Flowtriq classifies all eight common attack families so you know exactly what you're dealing with, how it's being delivered, and what evidence you need for abuse reports.
| UDP Flood | Most common against game servers. High-volume junk UDP packets saturate bandwidth. |
| SYN Flood | Exhausts connection tables on servers handling TCP-based matchmaking or login APIs. |
| DNS Amplification | Spoofed DNS queries reflect massive responses at your server IP. |
| NTP Amplification | Similar reflection technique using NTP monlist. Amplification factor up to 556x. |
| ICMP Flood | Ping floods that saturate bandwidth and can overwhelm older network stacks. |
| TCP RST/ACK | Targets active player connections, forcing disconnects mid-match. |
| GRE Flood | Encapsulated traffic floods that bypass simple UDP/TCP filtering rules. |
| Multi-Vector | Combines multiple attack types simultaneously to overwhelm layered defenses. |
Attack Classification:
Type: UDP Flood
Confidence: 96%
Peak PPS: 89,412
Peak BPS: 3.2 Gbps
Duration: 4m 22s
Protocol Breakdown:
UDP: 97.2% ████████████████████░
TCP: 2.1% ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
ICMP: 0.7% ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
Top Source Ports:
19/udp (chargen) 41%
53/udp (dns) 33%
123/udp (ntp) 18%
random 8%
PCAP: 10,412 packets captured
_
Built for Game Infrastructure
Every feature a game studio needs
Flowtriq was designed for teams running their own servers. No BGP sessions to configure, no GRE tunnels, no traffic rerouting. Just install the agent and go.
Multi-Region Monitoring
Deploy the FTAgent across every game server region: US-East, EU-West, Asia-Pacific, South America. Each node reports independently with sub-second latency. See all regions in a single dashboard with per-region incident timelines and aggregated analytics. Know instantly whether an attack targets one region or all of them.
Attack vs. Player Surge
A legitimate player spike and a DDoS flood both cause traffic jumps. Flowtriq distinguishes them using protocol analysis, connection state tracking, and dynamic baselines that learn your normal traffic patterns per time-of-day and day-of-week.
PCAP Forensics
Every incident captures a full packet-level recording starting 500 packets before the attack began. Download PCAPs, analyze source IPs and payloads, and use them as evidence for abuse reports and takedown requests to upstream providers.
Auto-Mitigation & Escalation
Configure automatic responses that trigger when specific attack types are detected. At the node level, rate-limit UDP floods and block known-bad source ranges using kernel-level firewall rules. For larger attacks, Flowtriq auto-escalates to BGP FlowSpec filtering, RTBH routing, or upstream cloud scrubbing via Cloudflare Magic Transit, OVH VAC, or your preferred provider. Set different rules per attack type and severity. No human intervention required.
Incident Reports
Generate detailed PDF reports for every incident with traffic graphs, attack classification, PCAP summary, and timeline. Share them with your publisher, your hosting provider, your investors, or your board of directors. Professional, exportable evidence instead of hastily taken screenshots and Slack messages.
API & Webhook Integration
Hook Flowtriq into your existing game ops tooling. Push incident data to Grafana, trigger custom scripts via webhook, pull metrics via REST API, or pipe alerts into your game's admin panel. Full programmatic access to every metric, incident, and configuration setting. Build custom automation that fits your team's workflow.
Comparison
Enterprise solutions vs. Flowtriq
You shouldn't need a six-figure budget and a dedicated network engineering team to protect your game servers. Here's how Flowtriq compares to traditional enterprise DDoS solutions.
Enterprise DDoS (Akamai, Arbor, Radware)
- $50,000-250,000 per year contracts
- Requires BGP sessions and GRE tunnels
- Weeks to months for deployment
- Dedicated network engineering team needed
- Traffic must route through their scrubbing centers
- Minimum commit volumes and overage charges
Flowtriq
- $9.99/node/month or $7.99/node/year
- Two-command install, no network changes
- Detecting in under 60 seconds after install
- Any developer can deploy and manage it
- Runs directly on your servers, no rerouting
- Pay only for the nodes you actually use
| Annual cost (20 servers) | $2,400/year vs. $100,000+/year |
| Deployment time | Under 5 minutes vs. 2-8 weeks |
| Detection latency | Sub-second vs. 30-60 seconds |
| PCAP capture | Included vs. add-on or unavailable |
| Multi-cloud support | Any Linux server vs. vendor lock-in |
| Minimum contract | None (7-day free trial) vs. 12-36 months |
FAQ
Common questions from game studios
Can we deploy across multiple cloud providers?
Yes. The FTAgent is a lightweight Linux binary that runs anywhere Linux does: AWS, GCP, Azure, OVH, Hetzner, bare-metal colocation, or your office rack. Install it on every game server regardless of provider and manage them all from a single Flowtriq dashboard. There are no vendor-specific dependencies or network requirements. Many studios run US servers on AWS, EU servers on Hetzner, and APAC servers on a different provider entirely. Flowtriq handles all of them from one workspace.
How does Flowtriq distinguish legitimate player surges from attacks?
Flowtriq builds dynamic baselines from your normal traffic patterns, learning what typical PPS and BPS looks like for each node by time-of-day and day-of-week. When traffic spikes, it analyzes protocol distribution (TCP vs UDP vs ICMP ratios), connection state patterns, and packet characteristics. A legitimate player surge shows healthy TCP handshakes and established connections. A DDoS flood shows anomalous protocol ratios, spoofed sources, and no valid connection state.
Can we integrate Flowtriq with our existing monitoring stack?
Yes. Flowtriq supports webhook notifications that push incident data to any endpoint. Use the REST API to pull metrics into Grafana, Datadog, or your custom game admin panel. Alert channels include Discord, Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, email, SMS, and generic webhooks. You can also trigger automated responses via the mitigation API.
What about console matchmaking servers?
If your console matchmaking, lobby, or dedicated game servers run on Linux, the FTAgent monitors them the same as any other server. It reads kernel-level network stats with zero overhead on your game process. This covers bare-metal dedicated servers, cloud VMs running Linux, and containerized workloads. The agent has no dependency on the game engine, protocol, or platform SDK. Whether you're running Unreal Dedicated Server, a custom C++ game server, or a Rust-based lobby service, Flowtriq monitors the network layer underneath without any integration code.
Related Use Cases
More industries we protect
Flowtriq works for any team running Linux servers that need DDoS visibility. Here are some common use cases.