Housemarque is the second developer experiencing major performance server issues due to Meltdown


A few days ago, Epic Games’ servers took a big hit after patching them to prevent the Meltdown security issue that affected all Intel’s CPUs. And from the looks of it, Housemarque Games, the studio behind Resogun, Alienation, Matterfall and Nex Machina, is the second developer that has experienced major server issues after patching the Meltdown Intel security flaw.

According to the team, Nex Machina’s backend server has experienced 4-5 times bigger load than it did before after patching the Meltdown vulnerability. As a result of that, Nex Machina suffered from various server problems including the availability of online arena, leaderboards and player customization.

It’s also worth noting that Ubisoft experienced yesterday some major server issues that affected all of its games. Although the team did not reveal whether these server issues were caused by the Meltdown patches, the timing of these server issues suggests that they could be related to it.

Back in January 6th, Epic Games shared a graph showing the CPU utilization of one of its gaming servers sky-rocketing from 25% to almost 60%.

But anyway, Housemarque is the second developer that has publically stated the obvious: that the Meltdown patches have a significant performance impact on the servers. As a result of that, PC and console gamers may experience major issues while playing their favourite games, at least for now until developers and publishers successfully mitigate these server issues.