Volcano Studio

Volcano Studio scales their Web3 game to a global audience with Cloudflare

Volcano Studio is a game development company that created ChickCoop, a blockchain game integrated with AI Agents. They provide an engaging, easy-to-access gaming experience to millions of users around the world. The studio serves both traditional Internet users who are curious about blockchain technology but lack prior experience, as well as existing Web3 users.

ChickCoop is accessed directly on Telegram. Volcano Studio has found that users enjoy the convenience of accessing a game without needing to download additional apps. "The engaging gameplay and compatibility with their daily communication on Telegram make it a unique offering," says Kane, founder and CEO of Volcano Studio. "With a seamless user interface and a focus on fun and interaction, our game caters to users who enjoy quick and entertaining activities on apps they already use."

Controlling expenses while scaling quickly to a global audience

With a lean team of about 50 employees and with millions of users to serve, Volcano Studio needed to move fast and control expenses while serving a worldwide customer base. And they had to build on Web3 technology, yet support Web2 customers.

One of the biggest challenges was infrastructure cost. "Traditional cloud platforms require significant upfront investment and ongoing operational costs for running game servers, databases, and scaling infrastructure. These costs quickly become prohibitive. Cloudflare R2 solved the infrastructure costs issue with free egress and simpler pricing, making our infrastructure more cost-effective as we scale,” says Kane. “These costs could quickly become prohibitive."

Volcano Studio was relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but expenses for content delivery were scaling linearly with their customer base, making rapid growth cost-prohibitive. The AWS pricing structure was also complex, and they found themselves paying high egress fees while using S3 for object storage. The team wanted to simplify pricing and implement a cost model that would not restrain fast growth.

Eliminating egress fees and implementing and a simpler pricing structure with Cloudflare

Volcano Studio turned to Cloudflare for infrastructure cost savings. They migrated from AWS S3 and CloudFront to Cloudflare R2 and the Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN). "Cloudflare R2 solved the infrastructure costs issue with free egress and simpler pricing, making our infrastructure more cost-effective as we scale," says Kane.

Meanwhile the Cloudflare CDN, in combination with Argo Smart Routing and Cloudflare's edge computing capabilities, allowed Volcano Studio to serve content to users around the world while getting their costs under control. Overall, by moving to Cloudflare, Volcano Studios reduced their infrastructure costs by 80%.

"Cloudflare helps us efficiently distribute content, reduce latency, and provide an uninterrupted, high-quality gaming experience, regardless of where our users are located," says Kane.

Supporting unhindered innovation with the Cloudflare developer platform

Adopting Cloudflare came with the added bonus of a developer platform that could support Web3-based apps while enabling them to run code anywhere in the world. Volcano Studio relies on Cloudflare Workers for building and deploying serverless applications (including game logic), processing HTTP requests at edge locations, and optimizing application performance.

"Running our game logic and APIs at the edge of the network with Cloudflare Workers inherently improves scalability." says Kane. "As our player base grows, we can dynamically distribute workloads across Cloudflare’s global infrastructure without needing to provision or manage additional servers."

Kane also notes that Volcano Studio has cut the time needed for rolling out new features or fixes by about 35%, enabling them to iterate more quickly. "Our success with ChickCoop demonstrates how modern Web3 gaming applications serving millions of users can be built entirely on Cloudflare's developer platform," says Kane.

Combining security and reliability with further cost savings

Volcano Studio faces a range of attacks and malicious traffic. Their biggest concerns before adopting Cloudflare included massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that affected performance and reliability, bot traffic targeting their APIs, and content scraping attacks. "Before Cloudflare, we used other cloud providers' solutions, but they were not effective and the pricing model was hard to predict," says Kane.

The studio activated Cloudflare's security services, including DDoS mitigation and the Cloudflare WAF, to address security challenges. The results were immediate. "Cloudflare is incredibly effective, and the price is affordable, especially for a small startup like us," says Kane. Cloudflare has mitigated multiple application-layer DDoS attacks and malicious HTTP requests, protecting Volcano Studio from downtime and compromise.

The result: a more stable and secure platform, better performance for end users, and no more bandwidth wasted on malicious requests from bots and content scrapers. "Our uptime has improved to consistently near 99.99%, with fewer service interruptions even during peak traffic," says Kane.

Realizing immediate benefits and cost savings from improved performance

Using the Cloudflare global network for content caching and delivery has enhanced performance and increased user engagement. "We've seen a 30% improvement in speed, which has directly contributed to better user retention rates and increased session duration," says Kane. User interactions feel more immediate and responsive for players thanks to Cloudflare.

Volcano Studio also saves approximately 25 TB of bandwidth per month thanks to the Cloudflare network responding to requests instead of requests traveling all the way to origin servers. "We've reduced outbound bandwidth usage from our origins by 20–25%, cutting costs and freeing resources for other strategic initiatives," says Kane.

Building for the future

"Since integrating Cloudflare, our organization has scaled both globally and operationally,” says Kane. “We’ve attracted more players, reduced latency, and virtually eliminated downtime, which in turn boosted user retention and referrals.”

With smoother deployments and less time spent on maintenance, the studio is focusing more on innovation. “We’re rolling out new features faster and broadening our reach into new markets,” says Kane.

Cloudflare’s edge network and serverless architecture allow the studio to scale seamlessly as their user base and feature set expand. “This foundation not only supports current growth but also positions us to quickly evolve our platform, introduce new offerings, and confidently enter new markets — ensuring we remain future-ready," says Kane.