Source: https://gameye.com/glossary/vendor-lock-in/ --- title: "Vendor Lock-In in Game Server Hosting — Explained | Gameye" description: "Vendor lock-in is what it costs to leave a game hosting provider — SDKs baked into your binary, single-cloud infrastructure, egress fees, coupled matchmaking. How to spot and avoid it." --- # Vendor lock-in Vendor lock-in is the accumulated cost of leaving a hosting provider — the technical and commercial dependencies that make switching expensive, slow, or risky. In game server hosting it is rarely one thing; it is the sum of how deeply a platform embeds itself in your game code, your infrastructure choices, and your bill. ## The forms it takes in game hosting **SDK / code lock-in.** When a platform requires its SDK inside your game server binary (the GameLift Server SDK, the Agones SDK), your server carries vendor-specific lifecycle code. Switching means ripping that out and integrating someone else’s — and keeping it compatible across engine upgrades. A [zero-SDK](https://gameye.com/glossary/zero-sdk/) server, by contrast, is a portable artifact. **Infrastructure lock-in.** If a platform runs on one cloud only (GameLift is AWS-only), your sessions can’t move to another provider, to your own [bare metal](https://gameye.com/glossary/bare-metal-servers/), or across regions a single vendor doesn’t serve — and there is no cross-provider failover if that vendor has an incident. **Pricing & egress lock-in.** The subtlest form. A discount that only applies while you stay fully inside one ecosystem is lock-in by another name — you keep the benefit only as long as you don’t leave. [Egress fees](https://gameye.com/glossary/egress-fees/) are a related trap: when moving your traffic out of a provider carries a per-gigabyte cost, the bill itself discourages you from going multi-cloud. **Matchmaker & data lock-in.** When hosting is coupled to a proprietary matchmaker, or your player data has to flow into the platform to run placement, migrating means rebuilding your matchmaking — not just your hosting. **Operational lock-in.** Fleet models, config formats, and IAM or CloudFormation templates encode your operations into one vendor’s control plane. The more of your ops that lives in vendor-specific tooling, the higher the exit cost. ## How to measure it Lock-in comes down to one question: **what does it cost to leave?** Concretely — - Is your server a portable [container](https://gameye.com/glossary/game-server-orchestration/) image, or does it embed vendor code? - Can the same build run on multiple providers, or on your own hardware? - Is any pricing benefit contingent on staying exclusive to one platform? - Is your matchmaker decoupled from your host? - How much of your operations is written in vendor-specific config? The more “yes, portable” answers, the lower your lock-in — and the more leverage you keep on price and performance. ## How to avoid it Low lock-in comes from keeping the integration surface small and standard. Gameye is built this way: your server is a plain Docker image with [no SDK](https://gameye.com/glossary/zero-sdk/) inside it; it runs across [21 providers](https://gameye.com/glossary/multi-provider/) plus bare metal — or your own hardware via BYOI; bandwidth is included, so egress never taxes a move; and any HTTP matchmaker (Nakama, Pragma, FlexMatch in standalone, or a custom backend) allocates sessions through one REST call. Nothing about your game is welded to the platform: if you ever want to leave, you take the image with you. Building a multiplayer game? Gameye hosts dedicated game servers: ship your server as a Docker container and start one per match with a single API call, in a region near your players. [See how it works →](https://gameye.com/how-it-works/) [Back to Glossary](https://gameye.com/glossary/) ## Related terms - ### Zero-SDK architecture Zero-SDK architecture is a game server hosting approach where no SDK, plugin, or code changes are required inside the game server binary. The platform manages everything externally. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/zero-sdk/) - ### Game Server Orchestration Game server orchestration automates server management — session scheduling, scaling, placement, health monitoring, and failover via a single control layer. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/game-server-orchestration/) - ### Egress fees Egress fees are charges cloud providers apply to data leaving their network. For multiplayer games, egress typically represents 40-60% of total infrastructure cost. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/egress-fees/) - ### Multi-provider A multi-provider architecture distributes game servers across multiple independent infrastructure providers in each region, eliminating single-provider dependency. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/multi-provider/)