My Tizen multiplayer drawing game flopped, but then hit 100M drawings
Hi HN, I built the first version of Drawize back in late 2016 specifically for a Samsung Tizen OS app contest. I crunched and built the whole thing (including the real-time multiplayer engine) in under 4 weeks. It didn’t win anything in the contest. Since it was built with web tech anyway, I published it on the open web in early 2017 just to see what would happen. It started living its own life, and today — 8 years later — the database processed the 100,000,000th drawing. On the busiest days it’s been 30k+ active users, and storing 100M drawings currently sits at ~3.16 TB. The milestone…
In plain words
Drawize is a real-time multiplayer drawing game where users collaborate and create sketches together online. Built with web technology and launched publicly in 2017, it has accumulated 100 million drawings across its database. The platform supports thousands of concurrent players on its busiest days and uses a backend designed for speed and efficiency. It appeals to anyone interested in casual collaborative drawing and creative play.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I built the first version of Drawize back in late 2016 specifically for a Samsung Tizen OS app contest. I crunched and built the whole thing (including the real-time multiplayer engine) in under 4 weeks. It didn’t win anything in the contest. Since it was built with web tech anyway, I published it on the open web in early 2017 just to see what would happen. It started living its own life, and today — 8 years later — the database processed the 100,000,000th drawing. On the busiest days it’s been 30k+ active users, and storing 100M drawings currently sits at ~3.16 TB. The milestone moment: I was watching live logs today, terrified the 100Mth drawing would be NSFW. Luckily, the RNG gods smiled and it turned out to be a Red Balloon (You can see the 100Mth drawing here: https://www.drawize.com/blog/100-million-drawings-milestone) Tech stack (boring but fast): Backend: .NET + WebSockets (real-time sync) Frontend: hand-coded HTML/JS + jQuery (no React, no bundlers) Data: PostgreSQL & MongoDB Storage: Wasabi Cloud (moved there to save on S3 costs) Scaling as a solo dev: real-time lobbies + reconnection edge cases + moderation/content filtering. I use content classification models trained in 2021 to filter bad content, and the real-time multiplayer side is mostly highly optimized .NET code. Happy to answer questions about the “failed” Tizen origin, real-time multiplayer on the web, moderation, or how .NET handles the load.
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