If I have a system where my distributed service is sending live scores of 1000s of football games from some hypothetical event to millions of clients. The service subscribes to the games from a source service that publishes the scores. The source publish happens over the id of the game i.e. each game is published on a different topic that my service subscribes to.

In this situation I need my service to have instances where each instance handle a set of games i.e. I do not want all instances to handle all games. How could this be accomplished? If I use a micro-service based architecture, it is supposed to be stateless so that won’t work, right (unless I separate them out as different micro-services per set of games they handle)? What alternatives are there?