Launch and scale your multiplayer game with Epic Online Services and Edgegap
February 7, 2024
This guest blog post was written by Mathieu Duperre from Edgegap.
Studios and publishers have greater ambitions than ever when creating new online game experiences. These ambitions shouldn’t be restricted by the massive challenges of multiplayer game development – from infrastructure, distribution, scaling, ops, and more.
Epic Online Services and Edgegap are partnering to make overcoming these challenges simpler and easier, for everyone.
Using the combination of these services will get your game online, ready for players worldwide to connect and play, no matter which game engine you use.
The performance improvements are massive and only possible with Edgegap; latency can be reduced by 58% on average versus traditional public clouds2, and up to 78% “real-time” latency (sub-50 ms), five times that of traditional public cloud (14%)2.
Edgegap makes developers’ lives easier with automation. Fully managed and cross-compatible game servers, battle-tested rapid-scaling up to 14M CCU in only 60 minutes3, instant DDoS protection, region-less hosting, multi-version support, and automated rolling updates are but some of the perks available on Edgegap’s platform. For customers, you’ll be in safe hands with 24/7 live support (Discord, Slack).
Best of all, pay only when your players play—that's it: no upfront costs nor fixed monthly fees.
Studios and publishers have greater ambitions than ever when creating new online game experiences. These ambitions shouldn’t be restricted by the massive challenges of multiplayer game development – from infrastructure, distribution, scaling, ops, and more.
Epic Online Services and Edgegap are partnering to make overcoming these challenges simpler and easier, for everyone.
Using the combination of these services will get your game online, ready for players worldwide to connect and play, no matter which game engine you use.
Simplicity and performance, finally
Using Edgegap’s Unreal Engine or Unity plugins, your game server becomes fully managed by Edgegap’s orchestration platform. This helps you skip complex backend development alongside ongoing time spent managing server infrastructure. Precious development resources can now be allocated instead to what you are best at – making your game great and fun.How does it work?
Edgegap’s automated orchestration caches your game servers to all locations on the world’s largest distributed multi-cloud network. On-demand and just-in-time, it deploys game servers nearest to your players in less than three seconds1.The performance improvements are massive and only possible with Edgegap; latency can be reduced by 58% on average versus traditional public clouds2, and up to 78% “real-time” latency (sub-50 ms), five times that of traditional public cloud (14%)2.
Edgegap makes developers’ lives easier with automation. Fully managed and cross-compatible game servers, battle-tested rapid-scaling up to 14M CCU in only 60 minutes3, instant DDoS protection, region-less hosting, multi-version support, and automated rolling updates are but some of the perks available on Edgegap’s platform. For customers, you’ll be in safe hands with 24/7 live support (Discord, Slack).
Best of all, pay only when your players play—that's it: no upfront costs nor fixed monthly fees.
What to expect
Unreal Engine and Unity-based game developers already trust Edgegap to simplify their processes and ensure a better multiplayer experience for their players.These simple steps will help you do the same:
- Supports Unreal Engine and Unity: Using either Unreal Engine or Unity is required to build a game server. Edgegap’s simple documentation (Unreal Engine, Unity) goes through every step to add it to your project.
- Edgegap’s plugin: Available for both Unreal Engine and Unity on GitHub.
- Edgegap’s OneToken gets you online: From the Edgegap plugin, simply click “Get a Token” to generate your Edgegap Platform token.
- Ready, Set, Go: Click “Build & Push” when you are ready to test your game server and “Deploy” when you want to launch it.
- Play: To connect to the game server from Unreal Engine, you can use the command console and type "open", followed by the URL and external port of your game server deployment, which you can find at the bottom of the plugin. From Unity, you can use the same URL along with your netcode of choice.
Rest assured that even moving forward, you can tweak your game and click the “Build & Push” button again to get your latest version online.
A more detailed guide with documentation links can be found on Edgegap’s website.
What’s next? Game servers are just the start
Game servers are one component of the multiplayer ecosystem. Edgegap in combination with Epic Online Services offers all the complimentary services necessary to get your game online:- Player Authentication: Epic Account Services lets you tap into an ecosystem of millions of player accounts, so players can jump right into your game with their existing friends.
- Sessions & Lobbies Management: Using Epic Online Services Sessions or Lobbies, you can manage players as they come and go. Additionally, Lobbies can be further enhanced with features like Voice to enable seamless voice chat for your players.
- Player Moderation: Epic Online Services Anti-Cheat, Sanctions, and Player Reports help you prevent nefarious activities and ensure players worldwide have fun in a fair environment. It is critical for games with virtual economies.
- “Smart” Fleet Manager: Games requiring long-lasting sessions with large player counts, such as MMOs, benefit from the massive perks gained from a traditional fleet manager. Edgegap’s “Smart” Fleet learns from players’ behavior to scale and optimize the deployment’s location to minimize latency.
- Competitive Matchmaker: If your game requires a competitive matchmaker based on ELO and game modes, Edgegap’s fully managed matchmaker will help you get up and running quickly. This matchmaker can be combined with Epic Online Services Lobbies to group players and create a great match.
- Distributed Relays: Games relying on peer-to-peer networking are prone to latency, cheating, and NAT issues. Epic Online Services’ peer-to-peer functionality offers relay server functionality to help address this. For increased configuration and integration with Edgegap’s orchestrator, Edgegap’s Distributed Relays are a cost-effective way of providing a greater experience to your players with 70% lower latency vs peer-to-peer alone2.
The Epic Online Services features mentioned above are just a sample of what is available. For more information on using and integrating those services, refer to their respective documentation pages from Epic Games and Edgegap.
Share and learn with fellow developers
For a real-world use case of a game studio using the Edgegap platform, learn how Edgegap helped Expedition Agartha from Matrioshka Games simplify their server management and distribution for their Unreal Engine-based extraction shooter. You can also experience Edgegap in action with cross-platform, dinosaur MMO Path of Titans.Of course, the best way to be convinced of the value offered is to try it yourself. Sign up for an Edgegap account to get started, or chat with the team on Discord if you have questions about the service.