Why Game Backends Still Use TCP, UDP, and Bare Metal in 2025

I get it. It’s 2025. Everything’s “serverless”, “cloud-native”, and “AI-optimized”. Your infra scales horizontally like it’s second nature, and you probably haven’t ssh’d into a box for months. So why on earth are game developers still messing with TCP, UDP, and yeah — even bare metal?

Because unlike most web apps, games don’t live in request-response land. They live in real time.

Let’s unpack that.

Games Don’t Wait

In a typical SaaS app, a user clicks something, and you get a request. You process it, maybe do a DB lookup, then send a response.
Milliseconds? Sure. But a few hundred won't kill you.

Now try that in a game.

Imagine you're playing a shooter. You move right. You shoot. That input better reach the server now, and the result better reach other players even faster. You’ve got one job: don’t make it feel laggy.

That’s why game backends don’t run on HTTP or GraphQL. They run on raw sockets, UDP, custom protocols, and things that most developers haven’t looked at since college.

Why UDP?

UDP is fast. It doesn’t guarantee delivery, but it’s stateless, lightweight, and predictable.

For most real-time games, like FPS or racing, speed beats reliability. If a packet gets dropped, who cares? There’s another one coming 30ms later. You don’t retransmit old positions — you just keep sending new ones.

That’s a mental shift from typical backend work, where loss = bad.
In games, old info is worse than missing info.

And Why TCP?

That said, not everything is real-time. Some things do need reliability. Like:

• Logging in
• Matchmaking
• Inventory management
• Chat

For those, TCP still works fine. It’s battle-tested, it guarantees order, and it plays nice with load balancers and firewalls.

Many games use both — UDP for gameplay, TCP for setup and state.

Bare Metal? Really?

Yup. In 2025. Still.

Why?

Because running game servers on bare metal means:

• Predictable latency (no noisy neighbor BS)
• Full control over network stack, threading, CPU pinning
• No cold starts, no funky VM spin-ups
• Cheaper at scale (yep, really — if you’ve got steady traffic)

Running thousands of players on optimized bare metal boxes can be way cheaper and faster than dancing with serverless unicorns that weren’t designed for 20ms tick loops.

But What About the Cloud?

Oh, the cloud is still in the picture. Most studios mix and match.

• Cloud for auth, accounts, payments
• Bare metal for game sessions
• UDP for gameplay
• TCP for player state

The backend is a hybrid. You use what fits, not what’s trendy.

Don’t Overengineer

If you’re building a multiplayer game backend, resist the urge to wrap everything in a nice little REST API and shove it behind API Gateway. That’s great for business dashboards. Not great for real-time input loops.

Sometimes, good old sockets are just better.

Still Skeptical?

Spin up a 10-player match using WebSockets and JSON and see how long your server lasts before the GC chokes.

Then do the same with UDP, a simple binary protocol, and an event loop tuned to your tick rate.

You'll feel the difference in your gut. Promise.

Final Thought

Game backends live in a different world. One where time moves fast, and players are ruthless.
If you make them wait, they’re gone.

And so we still choose UDP, TCP, and yes — even bare metal.

Because it works. Because it’s fast. And because it gives us what games demand: control.

Not everything old is outdated. Some things are just built right.