To prepare a game for a launch day denial of service attack, follow the four practices in the UK NCSC guidance: understand your service, understand your defences, create a response plan, and test that plan. Launches draw attention from players and from people who want to disrupt them, so do this work before the traffic spike, not during it.
Step 1: Understand your service
List every component a player touches between pressing play and finishing a match. Typically that means login and identity, matchmaking, game servers, a store, a patcher or content delivery, chat and any third party services behind them.
For each one, write down what it depends on and what breaks if it becomes slow or unreachable. The weak point is often a small shared service, such as a login database or a single regional entry point, not the big fleet of game servers.
Step 2: Understand your defences
Next, record what protects each component today. Ask who runs it, what traffic it can absorb, and who you call when it fails. The NCSC guidance covers online attacks including distributed ones. It treats physical attacks such as power loss as a business continuity matter, so keep those in a separate plan.
Check the unglamorous settings too. Are expensive endpoints, such as account creation, password reset and search, protected by per client limits? OWASP lists missing limits on timeouts, memory, payload size and operations per request as a way APIs get starved. Limits help with ordinary abuse as well as attacks.
Step 3: Create a response plan
A plan that lives in one engineer's head fails at 3 a.m. Write down:
- Who declares an incident, and who talks to players.
- Which switches you can flip, such as queueing logins, disabling non essential features, or turning off a region.
- Who to contact at each provider, with the account details they will ask for.
- What you will say on your status page, and where it is hosted. Do not host it on the same infrastructure that is under attack.
Decide in advance what you will degrade first. A game that still lets players play offline modes or existing matches while the store is down is better than one that fails entirely.
Step 4: Test your response
Run a tabletop exercise with the people who would be on call. Walk through a scenario: login is slow, then matchmaking times out, then the status page is unreachable. See where the plan has gaps, such as missing phone numbers or nobody owning player messaging.
Where you can safely do it, run a load test that goes past your expected peak, so you learn where things bend first. Do this only against systems you own and with your providers informed.
Launch week checklist
- Dependency map reviewed and shared with on call staff.
- Rate limits set on login, signup, reset and search.
- Spending alerts set on cloud and messaging services so an attack does not become a surprise bill.
- Status page hosted independently.
- Runbook rehearsed with the actual rota.
Safeguard is not a DDoS service. It can help earlier in the chain by scanning the packages your game services run on, so a known vulnerable library is not the cheap way in. A free scan is at https://gold.safeguard.sh/scan.
Quick check
Is a bigger server fleet the same as DDoS readiness?
No. Readiness means knowing your dependencies, having defences and a rehearsed plan. Capacity helps only if the weak shared services are also covered.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
