In a guest post on Google’s Developer Blog, Zupcat CTO Hernan Liendo said Google’s App Engine was instrumental in helping his company succeed at building its multiplayer racing game RaceTown without a huge budget.

According to Liendo, App Engine’s technology allowed the studio to deal with the various requirements facing social game developers, like ensuring high uptime, flexibility to deal with social networks’ API changes and the ability to concurrently manage thousands of players across the globe. “App Engine addresses these complicated issues,” he writes. “It provides few tracerouting hops from almost anywhere in the world, great uptime, automatic scalability, no need for infrastructure monitoring and a reasonable price for content delivery.”

The main strength of App Engine, Liendo explains, is that it not only serves as a solid backend server for games but also as a metrics server and content delivery network. Liendo also says the App Engine Datastore is perfectly suited for social games because of its high availability and the ease with which it handles “hundreds of millions of rows of data.”

Although RaceTown hasn’t been a runaway hit, the game’s certainly a proven success. Since launching last November, the game’s seen regular growth surges, peaking at 90,000 daily active users in August but it’s now bouncing between 30,000 and 50,000.