As publishers of leading independent games, the team at Devolver is never short on work. But as a small engineering team, they felt limited by their clunky infrastructure and were spending more time on system management than they needed. With Vercel, the Devolver team was able to cut time spent on system management and configuration by more than half, allowing them to bring game websites to life 73% faster. Soon after adopting Vercel, the team was even able to launch five websites during a 30-minute "press" conference without any issues.
“Our sites just work. We are never “on-call” in case there’s a problem. We don’t have to plan around traffic surges. Vercel is our CloudOps team, and we spend our time adding over-the-top easter eggs.” - Eli Penner, Web Developer at Devolver
Eli Penner, Web Developer, and Vieko Franetovic, Director of Interactive, have always kept the ideation and website publishing process pretty simple. They put an idea together, then start building a prototype. It’s informal—and they love it that way. It's what's allowed them to build websites quickly.
Unfortunately, deploying on their previous solution was unpredictable. Sometimes a popular game’s website would crash from site traffic; sometimes error messages would pop up out of the blue; sometimes they’d go back to an old site for updates and discover new errors that weren’t there before. From the time-consuming set-up to the planning required by their CI, they really couldn’t create the sites they wanted at scale.
To improve their workflow, the Devolver team moved over to Vercel.
Worry-free deployments: With zero-configuration integrations and built-in CI/CD, Devolver no longer needed to manage its infrastructure and could go from idea to shipping games in record time.
Faster feedback: Preview URLs on each pull request enable the Devolver team to iterate and share their progress with team members often, shortening the feedback loop.
Robust local testing: Instead of redeploying ever time they wanted to test API routes, the Vercel CLI gave the Devolver team the ability to simulate the production environment locally and easily test changes.
Reliable support: Even when problems arise, the Devolver team can submit a ticket and get a Vercel support team member to troubleshoot in minutes.
Their first project on Vercel was a revamped Enter the Gungeon website, and they haven’t looked back. They no longer have to spend time looking up error codes, triaging broken sites, or worrying about infrastructure. Now they can focus on what they love: Playing games and working on their websites.
With all this growth and time and frustration saved, they’re even looking to expand their team to a fourth engineer. If you want to move faster and have a more streamlined frontend workflow like Devolver, reach out to learn more about Vercel can help.