The China mobile version of Goose Goose Duck launched across all platforms on Wednesday, but was almost immediately hit by server crashes as an overwhelming number of players flooded in on day one.
Many users reported disconnections and difficulties logging in, while scalpers were seen reselling game IDs at inflated prices. The issue quickly set off a wave of online discussion in China, with #Goose Goose Duck servers down# climbing to the top of Weibo’s trending list.
Servers crashed twice, disrupting player experience
According to player feedback, the game’s servers suffered repeated lag and disconnections after launch, and some users were forcibly kicked out during critical matches. In some cases, the system mistakenly flagged these players for passive play, which led to deductions in their reputation scores and triggered widespread complaints.
In response, operator Kingsoft Shiyou and exclusive distributor Huya Live said server demand had far exceeded expectations and that technical teams were working urgently to expand capacity.
Game team issues two apologies and announces additional compensation
On Wednesday evening, the Goose Goose Duck game team released its first apology and promised that all players would be compensated with in-game virtual coins and items. All compensation will be sent to players’ in-game mailboxes once the servers stabilize.
However, as server fixes fell short of expectations, the game team issued a second apology later that night, adding game skins to the compensation and confirming that reputation points wrongly deducted would be restored in a future update.
Tech bottlenecks resurface during China launch
This was not the first time Goose Goose Duck faced server problems. In early 2023, the game’s Steam servers crashed twice due to a surge of Chinese players, with the development team admitting they had underestimated player growth.
Ahead of the China mobile launch, the game team fixed issues such as payment errors and voice chat bugs, but failed to fully anticipate the impact of heavy traffic, exposing weaknesses in the technical architecture.
The road ahead: tackling server strains and ensuring smooth gameplay for high-concurrency games
The game team stated that they will continue optimizing server performance and, based on previous patch cycles, expect stability to be restored within three days.
As a highly social, real-time interactive game with heavy concurrency, Goose Goose Duck’s servers must handle multiple simultaneous loads, including voice communication, game logic processing, and animation rendering. Domestic developers often face challenges in coping with viral-level traffic surges, such as insufficient redundancy in system architecture and incomplete cross-region disaster recovery mechanisms.
Balancing viral popularity with user experience has become a critical challenge for the industry. Developers need to implement standardized processes for stress testing, elastic scaling, and staged releases, simulating tens of millions of concurrent users to identify potential weaknesses in advance.
At the same time, techniques like server sharding and dynamic migration should be explored—automatically assigning players to the optimal server based on location or adjusting resources in real time during matches—to prevent localized overloads.