We wanted to get the request patterns to match, which involves calling them in the right sequence and with the right timing.' 'Lastly, for the load tests, they were hard to get right because it took both research and iteration to get the client requests simulated realistically. 'This environment contained our full set of services and was necessarily scaled up beyond our production environment in order to handle our times five load projection,' Sanders explained.

He also said it was expensive, in terms of both engineering hours used and the power needed to run the load test environment. Writing load tests was a unique task that required its own code Sanders said that the team got almost zero reuse from their existing code base. Sanders moved on to explain load testing, which is essentially testing the capabilities of the backend by simulating the game's expected usage after its relaunch. We spent some time with load projections to figure out what player population levels we might see and we also spent time analysing our architecture to set up a backlog of potential issues.' 'Our analysis tasks revolved mostly around what to expect. This lower barrier to entry was expected to bring in lots of players that didn't want to or couldn't pay the sticker price,' Sanders explained. 'The plan was for Rocket League to drop its price tag. In his GDC talk 'Rocket League: Scaling for free-to-play', he discussed the timeline that the studio followed to carry out the transition, from scaling to accommodate more players, forging new partnerships to carry new software burdens, and the eventual relaunch. Matthew Sanders, the company's lead online services engineer, explained the main steps that Psyonix followed in order to prepare for the switch.

The update saw a huge uptick in new and returning players, and caused the game to pass over a million concurrent players for the first time ever. In September 2020, Psyonix remodelled its multiplayer smash hit Rocket League in a big way, pivoting from a premium game into a free-to-play, live service title.

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