Yes, it is fully self-sustaining. In fact, for the last 5 years, it has been my main full-time source of income, running entirely as a bootstrapped project from Croatia.

The revenue comes primarily from ads, plus a smaller portion from Premium ad-free subscriptions. Since I focus heavily on keeping infrastructure costs low (optimized .NET code + moving storage from S3 to Wasabi), the margins are healthy enough to be a very viable, bootstrapped full-time business.

You might be surprised — the game is actually deployed in just one region (US) on only two dedicated servers (Contabo).

Here is the breakdown of why it feels fast:

1. The Metal: I use one server for the Web App + Gameplay Backend (.NET), and a second server strictly for PostgreSQL and MongoDB. No virtualization overhead.

2. The Network: I use Cloudflare for static content, which handles the initial global load speed.

3. Aggressive Prefetching: I rely heavily on ServiceWorkers. When you land on the home page, the 'Play' page and game assets are already being prefetched in the background. When you click play, it loads instantly from the local cache.

4. Single WebSocket: Once connected, there is zero HTTP overhead. Every interaction — gameplay, chat, UI updates — travels through a single persistent WebSocket connection.

Keeping the architecture simple (monolith-ish) rather than distributed helps me keep the latency predictable and maintenance low.

Fixing it now, thanks for letting me know!

Feel free to shoot me an email, though I am currently swamped with the responses here and the Academy launch, so apologies if I am slow to reply!