The best open-source game server panel was released in 2015. Its developers have moved on. Its community maintains it through forks and fragile extensions. Its successor is still in beta. And every hosting provider you know is running some private variant of it, held together with duct tape and hope. The tooling that runs this industry hasn't had a new idea in years. It's had new paint.

The community has tried to solve extensibility on its own. Frameworks like Blueprint exist because the panel itself was never designed to be extended. And they work, to a point. But every extension is built on top of a system that doesn't know it's there. A panel update lands, and suddenly half your extensions are broken. You're left choosing between staying on an outdated version or spending hours fixing things that shouldn't have broken in the first place. The community effort is impressive. The fact that it's necessary is the problem.

Hosting providers are maintaining entire forks of the panel just to run their business. Not because they want to, but because the software doesn't let them customise the look and feel without conflicting with updates. They're bolting on billing support, building their own permission systems, adding customisable backups, improving metrics, and writing game-specific functionality from scratch. Features that should exist as standard, or at the very least be possible without forking the entire codebase. Every upstream update becomes a merge conflict. Every merge conflict is a risk. And eventually, most providers stop pulling updates altogether.

The permission model in most panels is binary. You're either an administrator with full access, or you're not. There's no middle ground. You can't give a support team member access to view servers without handing them the keys to the entire platform. You can't scope an API key to specific actions or resources. It's all or nothing, and in a system that manages your infrastructure and your customers' data, that's not a limitation. It's a security gap.

The Game Panel is built from the ground up as a modular system. Not a monolith with extension points added after the fact, but a system where modularity is the architecture. A significant portion of the panel's own core features are built as first-party modules, using the same extension system available to everyone else. If we can build on it, so can you.

The Game Panel also distinguishes between modules and plugins. Modules extend the panel's functionality, adding routes, permissions, and UI. Plugins observe and integrate, hooking into events and connecting with external services. Both operate within a capability and scoping system, so nothing is given blanket access to the entire platform. Extensions do what they need to do, and nothing more.

The Game Panel keeps the core and your project separate. The code that receives updates is distinct from the code you customise. When an update lands, it updates the core. Your configuration, your extensions, your customisations stay exactly where they are. No merge conflicts. No diffing your changes against upstream. No choosing between staying current and keeping your modifications.

How you run The Game Panel is up to you. Pull it in through Composer if you want full control over your PHP environment. Use the Docker image if containers are your thing. Download a self-contained build if you just want it running with minimal setup. Different approaches for different needs.

The panel itself is split into two contexts. The account context is where users manage the servers assigned to them. The platform context is where administrators manage the panel as a whole: nodes, eggs, users, infrastructure. These aren't just different pages behind a permission check. They're structurally separate, with distinct APIs and distinct authentication. A customer doesn't have restricted access to the admin system. The admin system simply doesn't exist for them.

That structural separation extends to how permissions work. Roles are granular and purpose-built. Define custom roles with specific permission sets. Assign them to users across either context. Invite users to accounts and give them a role within that account, so a team member can manage servers on one account without seeing another. Scope API keys to specific actions and resources, so an integration only has access to what it actually needs. The days of a single admin flag and all-or-nothing API keys are over.

A better panel shouldn't mean starting from scratch. If you're running game servers today, you already have infrastructure, nodes, and configurations that work. The Game Panel supports Wings out of the box. Your existing nodes, your existing servers, your existing setup. Swap the panel, keep everything else. The Game Panel also supports both v1 and v2 egg formats, so the server configurations you've built or downloaded over the years come with you. We're not asking you to rebuild your infrastructure. We're giving you a better way to manage it.

The Game Panel is for anyone managing a game server. Whether you're hosting a single server for your family, running a few servers for a community, coordinating a network with a team of moderators, or operating a hosting business with paying customers, the panel should adapt to how you work, not the other way around. You shouldn't have to wrestle with complexity you don't need, and you shouldn't hit a ceiling when your needs grow. The same panel that works for one server on day one should still work when you're managing fifty.

The Game Panel is open source under the MIT license. The code is yours to read, run, modify, and contribute to. Development happens in the open. There's no bait and switch, no open core that holds the important bits back behind a paywall. The panel that runs your servers should be something you own, not something you rent.

Documentation will be thorough, not an afterthought. Guides for getting started, guides for extending the panel, and developer tooling that makes building modules and plugins straightforward. If the extension system is only as good as the documentation around it, then the documentation needs to be as much of a priority as the code.

While there are plans for optional premium modules for specific use cases, the core of The Game Panel will always be free. Not because it's a growth strategy. Because the people managing game servers deserve proper tools, and building them is something I'm capable of doing.

The Game Panel is under active development. If you want to follow along, get involved, or just know when it's ready, sign up below.