The Game Server Hosting Company Private Equity Couldn't Buy

[music]
Welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast, where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games. We bring together the industry's brightest builders, investors, and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events, dissect emerging trends in games, share lessons learned, and have a great time. This podcast is also part of Naavik's growing ecosystem, which ranges from free and premium research to consulting and advisory services. For more information, visit www.naavik.co. This episode is brought to you by Heroic Labs. Post-IDFA retention is a guessing game for many studios, but not for Gram Games, the studio behind hits like Merge Dragons and Merge Magic. Working with Heroic Labs, they built player cohort targeting straight into their live ops. So, offers, events, and challenges shift

based on who's actually playing. The system is so robust that Gram Games calls it critical in a world where old tracking methods don't work anymore. Heroic Labs didn't just supply the back end. They helped Gram turn personalization into a core system. If you want to see how Heroic Labs and Gram Games rebuilt retention from the ground up, go to heroiclabs.com or check out the link in the show notes. That's Heroic Labs, the back end personalizing Gram Games live ops. This episode is brought to you by Overwolf. With over 1,500 games supported, 178,000 creators, and 113 million monthly active users, Overwolf is the guild for in-game creators. Whether you're a gamer, creator, or game studio, Overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating UGC into games. For game studios, Overwolf offers CurseForge for studios, a white-label solution that lets game

makers and publishers easily integrate mods safely and seamlessly into their games, both existing and new, at zero cost. It's battle-tested by AAA studios and games including Krafton with Enzoic, Studio Wildcard with Ark, Take-Two Interactive, and others. Alongside this, Overwolf is the all-in-one platform that enables creators to build, distribute, and monetize in-game apps, mods, and game servers. In 2024, Overwolf paid over $240 million to in-game creators, proving that they truly value the talents and contributions of the gaming community. You can check out all Overwolf has to offer at overwolf.com or simply check out the link in the show notes. Now, let's jump into the episode.
Welcome to the Navic Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Kaylee Moore. Most people think about gaming infrastructure the way they think about electricity. You don't think about it at all, it has to work, but you notice the moment that it doesn't. Game server hosting is that

layer. It's what keeps player communities running between sessions, keeps persistent worlds alive, and determines whether a multiplayer launch looks like a triumph or a community relations disaster. It's also, as it turns out, a 15-year-old business that's been hiding in plain sight. Bisect Hosting started the way a lot of great infrastructure businesses do, with a founder who was frustrated by the existing options. Max Pikkidkin got into Minecraft during its beta. He found a player-owned server that he loved, and then he watched it go dark for 3 days with no response. And then, he decided to build something better himself. He put the first hardware on a credit card, recruited a co-founder that he'd met in his own Minecraft community, and grew the business without raising any capital. 15 years later, Bisect Hosting serves hundreds of thousands of clients across more than 140 countries, supports 110 plus games across 21 global server locations, and it's one of the only independent founder led operators left

at this scale in a market that's being rapidly consolidated by private equity. Today, we're going to discuss three things. First, how BisectHosting was built and what it looks like 15 years in. How the market of game server hosting actually works, what the economics are, the infrastructure trade-offs, and how the market's shifting. And then we're going to get into what 15 years of running an infrastructure company has revealed about how gaming communities form, sustain themselves, and evolve. Welcome to the podcast, Max.
Thank you.
So, I want to start your I love founder origin stories, and yours is definitely unique. So, you were working at Best Buy, you were voting for your own your own Minecraft server from the shelf floor, and then Andrew, your co-founder, finds the server because he thinks it's popular, and the two of you end up co-founding a company together without ever having met in person. Can you take us back 15 years ago? What did those

early days actually look like, and how long were you running this thing before it felt like it was a real business?
Yeah, I mean, it started pretty simply. Uh I found a server that I loved, and I and it just went down, and then me being like person that likes tech and technology and like seeing how things work, I decided to try hosting a server myself. So, at first, I hosted it, you know, on my computer, and it sort of was almost like a little shelter for the people who used to play on the the server that went down, and then more and more and more kept joining. So, I was like, "Okay, let's move this somewhere else cuz I I can't handle this on my internet connection at home." So, we tried a shared host, then a VPS, then a dedicated server, then we even bought our own hardware that we eventually collocated. Um and then during that whole time, you know, it was a learning process and um Andrew was someone who I

the other co-founder who joined the server um and then yes, maybe there was a little bit of cheating and of on the voting with the putting my phone in and out of airplane mode to get a new IP address, but that's beside the story. Um and then I find out he was studying computer science at the time. He was good with Linux. Um and you know, I at some point I was like, "Hey, you know, like we had terrible customer support experience through these iterations and different hosts. I'm like, "I think we can do a better job." Um and I've always loved code good customer support myself. So, you know, we got that first that server that went out as our first customer. Um and our goal since day one just been like really, really good support because gamers aren't patient. Um often if the server goes out, you have a whole community of people breathing down your neck why it's down and you know, we wanted to be different where we never wanted to say no and then help help the customer no matter what.

How long were you working at Best Buy while working on what then became BisectHosting? Like at what point were you saying like, "Okay, I can make this my my full-time gig?"
Uh I think it was around 2 3 years in. Um and it wasn't just Best Buy at the time I think I was at Best Buy literally one day a week to get a discount. Uh but I did have another job. I was actually working at a factory as an assembler, which is even even more different, but I remember doing support tickets with my hiding my laptop on the car cuz they definitely did not wanted me, you know, doing anything else. Um yeah, and I think it was 2 to 3 years, but one thing that I remember very clearly is when I like decided to leave, I I made sure to leave or like give my notice on my birthday and it it was like a little gift to myself.
That is a a wonderful birthday gift to go from the factory floor to building as Sauce. Uh over 100 employees which we'll get into your growth story. So you just

mentioned that the one of the first customers you had was the server that you used to play on which is the one that kept going down and frustrated you enough to start hosting your own. What did that teach you early on about the relationship between frustrations and the customers that you end up serving?
Uh I mean a lot of the frustrations, you know, we as a host we pretty much get blamed for most of the problems which, you know, it's fine. We'll take it and then that's and we'll learn early on to with the other you know, being with the other host when we had our own server like it they'll just tell you like, "Hey, it's not on on our end. You can blame them all you want." We again, we wanted it to be different. And now when somebody makes a support ticket, you know, a lot of most of the time the issues are not with our infrastructure. It's typically settings they change like mods they added, plugins cuz there's so many games that support mods, plugins and when you add things and you mix things made by many many different people, sometimes

things just stop working. Um so our goal has always been to never say no to the customer. So like no matter what the issue is like we will research it and you know, help help them fix the problem because like I said, you know, again it's you don't get a server to play by yourself. You get a server to play with your friends, family or run a community server which means, you know, it's not just you that can get on. It could be, you know, anywhere from a handful to a few hundred people that are aren't able to connect and play.
Yeah. And that first server that you were hosting where you met Andrew, how many people were part of that community?
Uh that community was I mean, I think at most we you know, it wasn't anything massive in comparison to some of the servers you see nowadays. But I think it eventually grew into a community of, you know, there was like on weekends there's like 20-30 people online and overall I think it was maybe

couple hundred total that would just, you know, rotate in and out. The crazy thing is that server is still online and then some of the original people that have, you know, been on it still playing it. We don't manage it anymore. We kind of passed the reins cuz we just don't have time. But it's been weird to like somebody like from the server added me on LinkedIn who was, I don't know, they were super young back then and they were like graduated college and are getting married and like having kids. Which this is just wild cuz it cuz we have been around 15 for 15 years, but that server was probably around closer to 17. So it's just crazy to think about.
Yeah, lifetimes. Um okay, so well first, do you ever go and play on it anymore ever?
Uh it's been a very long time. Unfortunately, I don't get to play games as much as I should or as I want to. Um so it's it's been like a few years, but I really I mean Andrew really needs to

get on it and pay it a visit. And then, yeah, it would I think it would be super fun.
So you and Andrew, you met on that server and then you actually worked together for a close to 2 years before ever meeting face-to-face. He was in the UK, you're in the US, and that geographical split turned out to be an accidental structural advantage giving you 24/7 support from day one with just two people. How did that really early remote-only experience shape the way you think about building a team.
Yeah, it's uh it's it's so weird to think about that especially because now we talk all the time. Back then we literally communicated on text only. We used a Google Chat before that became Google Hangouts and then I don't think it's even exist anymore. Um but yeah, we never even had like any calls or anything. It was just strictly text and 2 years in, you know, after having

you know, using that server and then deciding to start this, um I had an opportunity to go to the UK, which is where he lives through like uh this like international business class I had in college. Um and I was like, "Look, I'm like if you're going to do this, we should probably meet um to make sure like I want to know you're real, you can you can make sure I'm real. Um and it was really nice. Um but you know, we've always been remote and then the entire company's remote and I think, you know, like us being remote for so long has taught us like when we're hiring employees that we don't need an office, we don't need every force people to go to uh work. It you know, you can log in from anywhere because it's been successful for us and then, you know, it we can make it work for other teams, too. Um And again, we supplement with meetings, calls, we talk here and there

and then we started doing like offsites for our development team and trying to get other teams together. Um we'll even like if if there's people that live close to close enough each other, we'll we'll sponsor, you know, get-togethers, dinners, whatever they want to do. Kind of have like a somewhat of an open policy for that.
That's great. I I also run my company that way. I've always been remote first and I think the people who work with me, like that's just kind of their setting and feels like it's getting rarer and rarer with this the whole world kind of moving back to the office. So, I I personally love to see that.
So, a little bit more about your growth. You're 15 years in, as we've mentioned. You have nearly a hundred employees, hundreds of thousands of clients. You've never raised outside capital. What was the moment you realized that you built something much bigger than either you or Andrew had originally intended?
It I honestly don't know because it's still we we like, you know, I don't go every

day thinking like, oh, we have almost a hundred employees. Like, you just don't think about it. Um but every time it gets brought up, I'm like, wow, like this is like in- insane. And the crazy thing is I think I can name probably, you know, 90% of people by name. At least like if you give me anyone's name, I will know exactly what they do and I've talked to most of the people. We've always been like very approachable like and we want to keep things that way, no matter what. Like, anyone can message me or Andrew and like expect a reply. People can also, you know, if they disagree with us or you know, something we're doing, like they can say it. It doesn't matter like who they are, what position they're in. Like, we want everybody's opinion because this company's, you know, full of gamers and that's who we cater to as well. Um and yeah, I think we we recently actually started trying uh Gather, which is like a virtual office thing. It's it

almost looks like a game. You like build a virtual office and then when I when I log in, like the first day, my first thought was like, this is crazy because like you log in and then it shows 50 people online sitting like in their like virtual little desks. There's little like hangout areas. And just seeing that, I was like, wow, this is insane. I messaged Andrew like with a screenshot and I'm like, "This is crazy." I'm like, "There's so many people online." Um and it just kind of helped put things into a bit of a more perspective cuz it's a little bit different than like looking staring at Slack where you know, you see little bunch of little green dots, but seeing you know, like these little virtual people avatars at their little desks is like very very cool.
Yeah, it's more it's real in a in a virtual world, right? And I think that is such a good example of the metaverse actually existing. It's just different than what everyone thought it would be. I mean Um thank you so much for sharing your

origin story. Like I said, it's it's one of my absolute favorite. Now I want to get into more of the business side of things. So for those of us who don't fully understand the business side of games that we're hosting, can you walk me through how the business model actually works? Who are your customers? What are they paying for? And how does relationship change when the customer is a game studio versus a group of friends? Yeah, so the easiest way to think about it. So I mean, all in we're an infrastructure company. We purchase um hardware or you know, rent it from some of our partners and then we split it up. So you can think of it as the the like the physical server being like an apartment building and we then split it up into little apartments and then you can rent that apartment from us. And you're essentially renting resources. For gaming, we mainly do it based on RAM. Um and so you're paying for a certain

amount of RAM and then you know, you're paying for the server to be online. You don't have to worry about it and for the support. Um so what you know, the cost isn't just the support. It's like us purchasing the hardware, us hosting it and paying our like infrastructure partners in data centers, paying our, you know, employees, making sure that you have 24/7 support in, you know, and then constantly doing development, upgrading, adding new features. So, there's a lot that's going on and then, you know, often if you go to Reddit, everybody, you know, everyone's favorite opinion, just host it yourself, it's free. Um But, that it's really not free if you do the math, especially for somebody, you know, where if you live where electricity is more expensive, like there's some countries in Europe, if you do the math on like for an average server size, if you try to run it at home, and you have a gaming PC that's quite powerful, you're actually going to use more

um like electricity than cost than like if you were just to go to somebody like us. And then, with us, you also get so much more cuz if it's at home and things go down and you're away, your players can't get in unless you you come in and fix it. Here, like you can contact support, you can assign admins, they can contact support. Um so, there's just a lot a lot more options. And most of our customers are like individual players or smaller communities cuz if you have a super massive community, you're probably going to get your own dedicated server with your own team. Um but, yeah, our again, the support's like the biggest thing with us and always been. Like, if if something goes wrong, um you create a support ticket, most of the time you'll get Our reply time is under 15 minutes, but most of the time it's actually much, much faster. Um so, you can make a ticket, expect a reply within few minutes, which I think is very, very rare these days.
And can you tell me a little bit about

the B2B side of things? I I totally get as a, you know, private person, especially someone living in Europe, why I would never try to run my own game server. But, what do Do think, like what percentage of studios are working with a company like yours an infrastructure company versus doing their own hosting?
Uh it's same thing like we you know with the studio it's they're going to be again renting resources from us. But yes, they can do it themselves, but then it's a much bigger investment and because again you would have to invest into infrastructure and you don't know how many you know players you'll have. You might have a ton of players at launch, but that could drop or it could go the other way around. Uh but also just the team like it took us a very long time to build our infrastructure team our networking team. And it it's it's very easy at first when you have you know a couple machines, but now that we have thousands of servers across

you know 20 plus locations it's a very different game. Like we need some very very smart people on both on infrastructure and networking side. So if like so then do you have that support too like for the studios like hey if they see something's not working then you'd help with networking like picking hardware like we're able to provide that and also then provide the support for it because if you know if yeah they can rent or buy a bunch of servers, but then if they run into networking issues or hardware issues their path is contacting that probably much larger cloud provider and then who knows how quickly they're going to get help um and they deal with so many different customers versus we only deal with you know games and gaming so it's very hyper focused um like you know we we like they're going to get all the help you know they want or need.
Okay. And so that's great for the kind

of macroeconomics of it all. There's also a creator economy that's sitting on top of game server hosting and the I know we see it at multiple levels, right? We have larger server operators running Tebex storefronts that sell cosmetics, uh, perks subscriptions, but you've also built your own donation feature which goes directly into the panel and it's where people can contribute straight to that server subscription rather than send it to a PayPal of someone they've never met before. That How significant is that layer and what does that behavior, the donation behavior, tell you about the communities that you're serving?
Yeah, it's it's something we've been wanting to do for a while because we see I I I again, you know, our customers typically are groups of friends or like very small communities and it's it seems like there's always one person that's fronting the bill. Like sure, there might be people sharing, uh, you know, sending Venmo or Zelle payments to each other, uh, but

most of the time it's just one person paying for it and then sometimes people set up their own donations, but then players might not feel comfortable donating cuz you're just sending money directly to a person. You have absolutely no clue who else is sending in money, how much you're making, or where that's money going, if it's actually going towards keeping that server, uh, online or not. Um, so like you said, larger servers will use Tebex storefronts. They sell content that's, you know, as as long as it's EULA compliant. And then what we build is for smaller servers. Um, so now when any any server owner on our platform can create a donation links, give it to their community, friends, whoever, and then when somebody donates to that server, it goes directly to the account. They can't use it for anything else, so they can't just like take it out and go buy, you know, whatever they want with it. It can only be used on a server, so there's that trust, um, that, you know, when you donate, you know where it's going and

it's also they can make it like transparent so they see how much money's coming in and it literally like when you donate it says like thank you for your donation you're helped to extend the servers um uh like billing cycle you know this many days so there's a lot of transparency and since we launched it like we've you know adoption has been uh we've been very happy with it it's around 10% right now which is pretty good but we also don't like shove it down people's throats because we don't we don't like to do that like send a million marketing emails um but you know every month we see it grows a little bit every single time and then we're approaching in like $100,000 in total donations uh which might not seem like a very large number in the grand scheme of things but if you do the math you know I think it's it's around I think it's like 5,000

months worth of you know servers being online at like an average server cost um so it's so it's been really really great to see people taking advantage of it and we're getting a lot of feedback for it too people wanting like to add different features to it so they so they can use it even more
Oh that's wonderful So the hosting market has consolidated pretty significantly around you in 2021 Flex Capital took a majority stake in Netrado and then under that ownership Netrado went on to acquire both Apex Hosting and MCProHosting you're one of the few remaining founder led operators at scale what does a change in ownership especially by private equity company do to a hosting company and where does that difference show up for the studio or the server owner that's on the other side
consolidation, and I think, you know, there's rumors of like things consolidating even more. And then we had

offers to for us to sell more more than a few times, and then every single time we said no. And mostly because we don't we don't want like me and Andrew still like absolutely love what what we do. And and like you said, I think when you sell, it's, you know, things will change. No matter how much they tell you, you know, we'll keep we'll keep everybody on the team. Nothing will change. You know, from what we've seen, that's 100% not the case. Um so, we never set out to build, you know, a lot of companies set out to be sold one day, and that's kind of the mentality. We've we almost never had we never had like the mentality of a startup. We just absolutely love what we do. We like I we love providing like great customer support. We want to make sure these servers are like very easy to run. We want to make sure customers have help. And I feel like when that happens, you know, you you you see um

there's not as you know, if if if it's private equity is involved, the end goal is to build it up and then eventually sell it again because they need to make their money back. We don't want to be a part of that process because we want to, you know, we've always put communities and customers first, and we want to continue uh to do that.
Well, I love to hear that. I want to talk to you a little bit more about you putting the communities first, especially on the B2B side. So, one of the things that I found really interesting is when you described in our prep call your approach to game studio launches. You described them as being proactive, getting into a game's Discord before they've even engaged you, offering a pretest their server binaries, providing data that they can use to tune things before day one. Tell me a little bit about what what a studio gets from that relationship.
Yeah, so we've always talked about, you know, like how the studios and hosting companies and the players were all kind of in the same like this

ecosystem what something that benefits um game studio will benefit us. Something that benefits players that we do will benefit the game studio and and so on. So, we you know, we don't like to wait to be hired or partnered and then if we know a launch is coming, we want to know everything about that launch. Like as much as information as we can get. If, you know, sometimes it's very difficult to get a hold of the studios especially if they're larger. Um in those cases we'll, you know, we'll jump into their Discord. We'll see what the chatter is there, what people are talking about. And we'll always, you know, if if possible we can we'll try to get server files earlier from there so we can do our own testing because when a studio launches their game, their number one priority is to have a successful launch to make sure, you know, players can download and play the game. Servers are often an afterthought. Um but we think they're like super important because it build helps build

communities and then these communities grow, bring more people in these communities which is obviously great for us cuz we can host more servers. But it's more importantly it's great for the game because if the community grows and I experience the game and I enjoy it, I'm going to invite bunch of my other friends to play it whether it's on my server or a different server that I found. And those friends will need to buy the game so that's more sales for the studio. So, anything, you know, any info we can get and then do performance testing that we can then pass along to the studio, it you know, it's always been really appreciated. There's been many many times where even, you know, post launch we find bugs, issues and, you know, we try to reach out to community moderators or anyone else we can just to pass this info along. And, you know, most of the time we we do get replies that they're very happy and very thankful. And And even then they start having more conversations with us

after that because they're, you know, appreciative and they see we're truly trying to help because it's you know, we get nothing out of it most of the time, but you know, it helps the community, helps the studio. Um and again, like we're all in this the same ecosystem and we have the same goal to that the players have the best experience possible.
Do you have any specific examples, maybe in the last, I don't know, 6 months, a year, where you supported a studio at launch to help them grow and facilitate community?
Uh not at launch, but well, not immediately after launch, but during like big updates, we you know, we had a studio that came to us that was with another host before. Um and then again, there was not that much back and forth communications and, you know, they feel like it's been night and day difference with us because again, like we try to be uh I not just like a very, very good partner. And like the help we provide, I

like you know, we like to call like a very, very high-touch support. So, there's a lot of hand-holding and, you know, there's been um a lot of movement there like, "Hey, you know, like we have all these community servers, like it's a little bit difficult to view the stats from this way." And then so, we literally rebuilt, you know, our entire that B2B dashboard how it looks based on their feedback. And they've been like loving it loving it so far and then giving us more and more suggestions. Um and again, their their community has also noticed a difference once they switched, you know, there was no more downtime for hours or days. Our servers are more stable. Um yeah, like you know, like we said it like I said earlier, like anyone can get a server. It's just but then like you need to have that right team behind it to manage and run this infrastructure.
So, I want to shift gears a little bit.

To hear more about the trends that you're seeing, not just in the server industry, but also how they extend into gaming overall. So, even doing this for 15 years, is there anything that you think the broader gaming industry gets wrong about multiplayer communities? Like how they actually form and sustain themselves?
I think the industry still thinks too much in terms of, you know, launch weeks and concurrent player counts. Those matter, um but they're not what keeps the communities alive. The the games that have, you know, with uh longest longevity is the one that give players something to own. And, you know, we've seen this with Minecraft. Like it's absolutely crazy. And then I think luckily more and more games are doing this, but just allowing the freedom of like modding the game and creating their own content. Like we've seen like in the last few years like there's so much more more UGC every single day.

Um and it helps people like to come back to the game, you know, for for hours and hours and hours more because like it once you add mods to a game, it makes the game completely different. So, it's almost like you're playing a completely new game. One of the, you know, craziest things to me is like for Minecraft some of the mod packs that have been created have more downloads than, you know, some game launches, which is, you know, absolutely crazy.
I'm so so curious about this cuz obviously we I mean we have seen a major shift to UGC. I've been in the UGC space too for about, I don't know about 7 or 8 years and when I first got started you know, game studios weren't on board with UGC and we've seen an incredible swing of the pendulum the other way. What do you think is beneath that?
It's Yeah, so you're right. Like there's has been a shift and and it's not just Minecraft anymore and then a lot of games lean into it. I

think the biggest example in the recent years is Rockstar who's you know, they're very very very protective of their IP. I think you know, just yesterday they had some gameplay leaked of GTA 6 and with the speed they were like able to take most of these videos down is absolutely insane. So you know, they're very protective but then them acquiring the platform that you know, for 5M and kind of leaning into it was like very surprising I think to to everyone.
Yeah, and some cease and desist letters were sent.
Yeah, but yeah, it's just it's it's really really nice to see cuz and and now they're investing in the infrastructure making modding and all these things easier because they see that people love it and it brings so many more people back to to that game to experience these new mods, plugins or whatever it might be

depending on on the game and then it also gives you know, like for content creators it gives them like completely new content to go back to their favorite game that they used to play you know, maybe like months or years ago and when that happens if it's a big content creator, it brings more players back into the game. Like we've seen it on our end like when um a content creator like a popular content creator creator picks up a certain game mod pack or you you modified version of the game, we see like, you know, sales spike for that particular game cuz people want to experience it for themselves as well after they see it. And again, like that's great for the studio because it gets players back to them.
Totally. I hate this corporate term, but it is really like this UGC flywheel that I feel like people have finally embraced, right? Because it does matter for the bottom line.
Yeah.
Um okay, so going I know we just talked a little bit about the people who build

mods and the server plugins, but AI is making it easier for non-technical players to build mod servers. But you also on our prep call flagged what happened with some mod jams recently where AI-generated submissions were like clearly unfinished and it drew some backlash from the community. Is there a gap between what AI can generate quickly and what communities actually accept? How are you seeing that play out?
Yeah, so I you know, gaming community I feel like is very sensitive to AI because you know, gamers don't want stories, graphics to be made or, you know, written by AI. They They want, you know, a lot of people play some of games for like the story lines and it when they have a feeling it's written by AI, it feels less special to them. And then same thing for, um you know, graphics and overall. But I think if used correctly, you know, AI is a great tool.

Um and, you know, at least for some tedious to remove some of the tedious work, but it's never going to get you um 100% there. Like I think, you know, humans they're we all have our own special touch and I think you can tell when is something's made by um a human versus AI. Uh but yeah, we had a a a little hackathon we did as like one of our activities during like our offsite in Austin this year.
And this was internally. You had an internal hackathon.
Yeah, this was internally um or for a like engineering team offsite. And we it was like 3 hours long, I think, and we split up into four or five teams, and the amount of stuff like our engineers came up with in that period of time was like absolutely insane. They built like some of the like most unique and fun like features for Pando. Um and at first like, you know, my

managers' reaction was like, "Why like like this was 3 hours long. Why does it take us like months to release some of the other stuff?" Uh but then, you know, you come to realization that it's like it's very easy to get you 80% there, and like the feature looks great, but then once you start using it, really diving deep into it, you see something's a little off, something doesn't work as it should be, and so on. So, we all you know, like in in inside our company, we all just think like no matter what you're doing, like AI or even if it's like manually done, it's very it's very easy to get 80% there, and it's the final take 200% that takes a very long time. We as a company we I feel like we always move very slowly because we're very meticulous about things we release, and we want them to be as close to perfect as possible. Um and yeah, but uh in in overall community though, you know, we've seen um

similar things happen, but with not that were not received as well. Like with when Hytale came out, they had there's couple uh companies that did um hackathons for like creating mods, and what the community was complaining a lot that a lot of these mods were like very clearly just written, you know, 100% AI, just, you know, probably just so they can enter the the the mod jam and then, you know, potentially win whatever the cuz the prizes I think were monetary. Um so, that was not, you know, a great look because like the graphics were AI. They were like vibe coded mods, you know, they didn't work very well and then because of that, a lot of them were like there's a lot of the same ones that did the same things because, you know, anyone can go in and uh do it now. But, I think, you know, overall the the stuff that's clearly AI slop is just not going to be popular, not going to be used by people and then

plugins and mods that have are clearly, you know, somebody put a lot of time and effort into it will be the ones that uh end up succeeding and then what community will keep using.
I 100% agree with you there. You've actually recently built Biko internally, which is an AI companion that's embedded directly into the server panel that can inspect the actual server contacts, logs, configs, installed mods, backups. I want to hear a little bit about how you think about Biko and how Biko complements your support team as that's one of the most important parts of your company and like one of your key differentiators. How are you balancing the AI component with like the real person who's buying them the computer that's responding within 15 minutes?
Yeah, so it's it's obvious like we've seen in our in our industry like entire, you know, support teams being let go and just replaced with a chatbot. Um and we

never wanted to do that. Um like I again, like I said, we move very slowly. We're like pretty far into AI and how much it's used for like customer support, but we've, you know, only fairly recently like let Biko loose. Um and then we don't view it as like customer support. Like we view Beacon as an AI companion that's built into our panel. And it's because like if you have an issue with a setting um you have a question about a mod compatibility or any or like you don't want to look at, you know, a log that's a hundred lines long. Like yes, you can ask our support and then we'll reply to you very quickly you know, often minutes but for things like that, it's also very easy to just ask Beacon and then get a an instant reply and then, you know, save yourself some time. Um, but if you have a more complicated issue, something more nuanced, like

you're you know, this is what our support shines. But Beacon is like your assistant there for like any quick setting changes, checking your log, mods, compatibility issues and stuff like that. You can, you know, quickly say, "Hey, why is my server not working right now?" You know, it'll tell you like, "Hey, it looks like, you know, it's crashing because of this. Did you recently add this mod because it's a compatibility issue?" And then we see customers, you know, chat with it and then they take its advice and then their servers um back online. And, you know, and that's all done within just like a couple minutes versus creating a support ticket and then they have to wait, you know, a little bit longer. But I I again, you know, gamers aren't patient and the faster you can help a customer the better. But yeah, we've never saw it as a replacement as customer support because to us that's, you know, been super important since day one and it still is and will be into the future. But as a little helper companion, um,

you know, we think it's we think it's great.
Is Beacon live on all uh server panels?
Yeah, any customer can use Beacon. It's just it lives in our panel, you know, he doesn't like pop up and like try to force you to use him. Just lives in the bottom right corner. If customers choose to use it, great. And then, you know, if not, they don't they don't have to. But, you know, we saw even those that were like skeptical at first, after trying it, they're like, "Oh, actually, this is very helpful and like saves me a lot of time." Because you can also take, you know, the same logs and everything. You can go to any other You can go to chat GPT, cloud, or whatever, put those there. But then again, you're having to download things. You have to give it context. Over here, Beacon knows what game you're running, what's in your server, how, you know, like what plan you're on, and everything that. And we also made it to where, like, you know, like you have to give it

permission first to like look at your logs. It doesn't just have access to everything.
I'm really curious is to, you know, maybe maybe not adoption rates, but has Beacon drastically changed how many kind of I don't want to say entry-level support tickets, but I think you you get what I mean. Like, the support tickets that are like the really basic questions that Beacon can answer. What kind of reduction are you seeing in those types of inquiries in support?
No, it's honestly been great for that. We're seeing reduction in double-digit percent. I think you know, in sometimes up to uh 20% and but the best thing is about it again, you know, like it it we haven't like let go of a single person from our support team because like now we have, you know, you know, like we have 25, let's say, percent less tickets. Does that mean

like we need 25 percent less staff? I think a lot of companies would view it that way, but we don't because we view it as now our customer support. You know, and there was like fear in our customer support team where this was introduced. They're like like are you guys just going to let go you know of all these people? But that's not the case because for us now we have 25% like we literally told them like now you have 25% more time to put towards like customers with like more complicated queries. So like now you now you can spend more time researching a problem give a customer a more detailed reply you know provide much better support. And then you know we saw both of Biko and our support like our CSAT scores like is in high 90s. It's like I think the last report I'm looking like for Biko. It it was 90 92% which is like pretty incredible for

for little AI assistant. Um but now it's been super helpful. And it also this gave a lot of opportunities for my support team to move up to different positions. Like you know we have couple people from our support team now kind of helping us making sure Biko is performing well and managing that. Others went to different departments. Um so yeah it's been it's been super great.
Well we always love to hear great AI use cases in gaming where people are not losing their jobs. So well done Max and BisectHosting. Okay Max I want to conclude with one final question. We you've mentioned you've had acquisition offers you've turned them down. You've described BisectHosting as a generational business rather than a startup optimizing for an exit. What is the next 10 years look like if you're still independent and still running BisectHosting? And what do you think are

the major trends that we're going to see in the games industry.
Oh man, next 10 years. It feels like a long time, but also the last 15 flew by very quickly. But yeah, Beam NG never had like these big startup ambitions. We never even like called ourselves a startup. You know, we often like friends, family, they're like, "Oh, so like you have a startup?" We're like, uh I'm like, "Kind of, but not really." cuz we never viewed it that way. We always just wanted, you know, we never had a goal of like, "Let's build this into something huge and then sell it one day." The goal has always been to just be like really good at what we do and make sure like we enjoy it. And we still do to this day. Like like we generally like love it. Like me personally, I you know, like recently had we had our first child like who's now uh 7 weeks old. And so I did not take a parental leave, but I've also haven't been around as much. And like next week everybody, you know,

the bunch of the team's going to Gamescom and I have like the biggest FOMO ever because I also really want to go. Um and you know, I try to be online as much as possible still and see what's going on because, you know, and it and this actually whole thing made me realize how much we still love to do this. Um I mean but yeah, I mean in 5 10 years I truly still hope, you know, we're still running it the way we are that it's just me and Andrew with the right people underneath us because we definitely owe it to a lot of people in our team that have been here for a very long time. Um that, you know, have have been super super instrumental in our success. Like I'm I'll never say and take all the credit as if there's like me and Andrew. Like Um so I hope, you know, we're still around. These people are still around. And then, you know, I hope more people know know about us and then I hope, you know, we're working with more studios and then making it easier for them to

provide um service for their whether you know, they're doing community service or just have a partner they trust that they can send their players to.
Any big bold bets for the gaming industry in the next let's say 5 years? 10 is too long for that.
Uh I don't know. We'll we'll see what happens with uh I'm I'm I'm personally really curious like with like GTA coming out what things will look like and what Rockstar will do with you know, if there's going to have online sec part of it or they're just going to keep GTA online for a long time. Uh but I'm I'm hoping you know, game studios see again uh UGC not as their enemy and you know, continue to be less like I understand you know, like being protective of their IP and everything, but I think you know, letting people be more free with like

their crea- creativity. I I think it's going to I think it's going to be great for games and I and I do hope and you know, see more and more studios take take advantage of that.
I completely agree with you on the UGC front. Max, thank you so much for joining us on the Navic podcast and congrats on the new baby.
Thank you so much.
If you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, or give a five-star review. And if you want to reach out or provide feedback, shoot us a note at [email protected] or find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, if you want to learn more about what Navic has to offer, make sure to check out our website www.navic.co. There, you can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter, Navic Digest, or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging consulting and advisory services. Again, that is www.navic.co.

Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode.