For every "Best leaderboards plugin for [engine]" post on Reddit, there's inevitably someone in the replies saying "just write an API and host a server, it's not hard."

And for some people, that's true. Building a game leaderboard backend can be a genuinely enjoyable and educational experience. But "not hard" undersells what you're actually signing up for. A working leaderboard backend isn't just an API that stores and retrieves scores. It's infrastructure, security, scaling, moderation, and ongoing maintenance, all for something that isn't your game.

Before you commit, here's what the full picture looks like. Not to scare you off, but so you know what you're getting into.

You need to build a web application

If you've shipped game code but never built a web API, the jump is bigger than it might seem. The concepts are different: HTTP methods, request routing, serialisation, database queries, error handling for networked clients. It's a whole separate discipline.

The good news is there are plenty of solid resources for getting started. Python and Node.js both have interactive tutorials, and YouTube is full of "build your first REST API" walkthroughs that'll get you from zero to a working endpoint in an afternoon.

You could also use "vibe coding" tools like Lovable or Bolt to generate a backend. This can work, but it carries real risk if you don't understand what's been generated. Debugging networked code you didn't write and don't fully understand is a special kind of frustrating, especially when it's handling your players' data.

Hosting

Writing the code is one thing. Getting your leaderboard service running somewhere reliable is another.

If you've never provisioned a server, configured a database, set up DNS, or managed SSL certificates, the learning curve can be steeper than the application code itself. Services like Firebase or Supabase are popular and simplify a lot of this, but they come with their own abstractions to learn and constraints to work within.

Cost

Many cloud providers offer free tiers, and for a small game with a handful of players they might be enough. But costs have a habit of creeping up in ways that aren't obvious at the start.

Database storage, bandwidth, compute time, DNS, monitoring, logging. Individually they're small. Collectively they add up. And if your game has a viral moment, a sudden spike in traffic can turn a free-tier hobby project into an unexpected bill overnight. Set up billing alerts before that happens, not after.

Authentication and security

This is where things get properly difficult, and it's the bit that most "just build a server" advice glosses over entirely.

Traditional web authentication assumes you control both the client and the server. With games, you don't. Your game binary ships to players, which means the client code is in their hands. API keys embedded in game code can be extracted. OAuth flows can be intercepted or replicated. Any secret you ship with your game is, by definition, not secret.

The challenge is verifying that the request comes from a legitimate copy of your game, running unmodified, on a real device. That's a fundamentally harder problem, and it's one that professional game backend services spend significant engineering effort on.

Get this wrong and the consequences range from embarrassing (spam scores on your leaderboard) to serious (your server being hijacked by someone else, or player data being stolen).

It's not just ORDER BY score DESC

Here's something that surprises people: the actual leaderboard logic is more complex than sorting a database column.

A basic query is simple enough. But real-world requirements stack up quickly. How do you handle ties? Is it highest score, lowest score, or closest to a target? What about tiebreakers by submission time? Do you need "near me" queries that show a player their rank plus the scores immediately above and below them? Friend-only filtering? Time-windowed boards for daily, weekly, or seasonal competitions? Pagination that doesn't break when new scores are submitted between page requests?

At any meaningful scale, querying a relational database for ranked results gets expensive. Most production leaderboard systems end up using something like Redis sorted sets for fast ranking, backed by a relational database for durability. That's two data stores to keep in sync, each with its own failure modes and operational concerns.

None of this is unsolvable - in fact it's all been solved many times over. But it's a long way from the "just add a scores table" mental model that most people start with.

Performance

A leaderboard that works for ten players during testing and a leaderboard that works for ten thousand concurrent players are architecturally different things.

Connection pooling, query optimisation, caching strategies, rate limiting, graceful degradation under load. These are the concerns that keep Site Reliability Engineers employed. If you have any ambition for your game to grow beyond a small circle of friends, your backend needs to be able to grow with it.

Load testing before launch is essential and often skipped entirely. A tool like k6 or Locust can reveal scaling bottlenecks that are completely invisible at low traffic volumes.

Cheating

Most players and game developers care about keeping leaderboards clean. It's also one of the hardest problems in game backend engineering.

The difficulty ties directly back to the authentication challenge. If you can't fully trust that requests come from an unmodified game client, you can't fully trust the scores those requests contain. A player claiming they completed your level in 0.001 seconds probably didn't, but proving that programmatically is another matter.

The answer is layers: server-side validation of score plausibility, behavioural analysis, rate limiting, and more. Plus moderation tools that make it straightforward for game owners to review flagged scores and take action. Detection and response matter more than prevention, because prevention alone isn't realistic when the client is untrusted.

Building all of that from scratch is a significant engineering effort on top of everything else in this article. It's one of the areas where LEADR puts a lot of focus, with multiple techniques applied to every score submission and tooling to make review and cleanup easy when it's needed.

Maintenance

Let's say you've built it all. The API works, the server's running, scores are being submitted and ranked correctly, cheaters kept at bay. Job done? Not quite.

Servers need security patches. Dependencies need updating. Databases need backups, and those backups need to actually be tested. (Restoring from a backup you've never verified is not a backup strategy, it's a hope strategy.) SSL certificates expire. Monitoring needs reviewing. If your game stores any player data at all, you probably have GDPR obligations depending on where your players are.

When something breaks at 2am because a database migration went sideways or a cloud provider changed an API, that's your problem to fix. Every hour spent maintaining your leaderboard backend is an hour not spent on your game. For some developers the infrastructure work is genuinely enjoyable and worth doing for the experience. For others it's a tax on the thing they actually want to be building.

Or you could not build it

Most game devs make games because they want to make games, not web servers. If any of the above has given you pause, that's not a bad thing. It means you're making an informed decision rather than finding out the hard way three months in.

LEADR is an open-source leaderboard platform for game developers and exists specifically for this. The open-source core is free to self-host under the Apache 2.0 licence if you want the control without building from scratch yourself. The cloud service includes a free tier if you'd rather not deal with hosting at all. Either way you get leaderboard infrastructure that handles the ranking, security, anti-cheat, and scaling described above, so you can focus on making your game.

Rolling your own is absolutely valid if that's what you want to do. Just make sure it's a deliberate choice, not something you stumble into because someone on Reddit said it wasn't hard.