Devolver Cuts Site Launch Time by 73% After Moving to Vercel

Devolver Digital, the indie game publisher behind titles like Enter the Gungeon, runs a lean engineering operation. But the small team found its old infrastructure was eating up too much of its day. System management and configuration work consumed more than half of their engineering time, limiting how many game websites they could produce.

After switching to Vercel, the team reduced that overhead dramatically and now ships game sites 73% faster. The improvement was put to the test almost immediately: during a 30-minute press conference, the team launched five separate game websites without a hitch.

"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

From Unpredictable Deploys to Zero-Config Shipping

Web Developer Eli Penner and Director of Interactive Vieko Franetovic have always kept their process lean: come up with an idea, build a prototype, ship it. That informal workflow worked well — until they hit the deployment stage.

Their previous setup was unreliable. Traffic spikes could crash a site for a popular game. Error messages appeared with no clear cause. Returning to an old site for updates sometimes surfaced new, previously unseen errors. On top of that, the CI pipeline required significant planning and setup, making it difficult to produce sites at the pace the publisher wanted.

Moving to Vercel eliminated most of that management overhead. Key improvements the team cites:

  • Zero-configuration deployments: With built-in CI/CD, Devolver no longer maintains its own infrastructure and can move from idea to a live site quickly.
  • Faster iteration cycles: Preview URLs are generated on every pull request, so team members can review and share progress early in the process.
  • Local production simulation: The Vercel CLI lets developers test API routes locally against a production-like environment instead of redeploying for every change.
  • Responsive support: When issues do come up, the team can open a ticket and get troubleshooting help from Vercel support in minutes.

Focus Shifts From Infrastructure to Easter Eggs

The revamped Enter the Gungeon site was the team's first project on Vercel, and the switch stuck. Devolver engineers no longer spend time decoding error messages or triaging broken sites under load. The freed-up time goes into the work they actually want to do, which frequently means building playful, over-the-top easter eggs into their game sites.

The reduced operational strain has also opened up capacity for growth: the team is currently looking to bring on a fourth engineer.