More capabilities to make your multiplayer game even better

Making multiplayer games isn’t easy, but the rewards make it well worth it.

In September of last year, we launched a new self-serve experience for our Game Server Hosting (Multiplay) and Matchmaker products to make it easier for everyone to get their hands on the tech that supports some of the biggest multiplayer games in the world.

Since then, we’ve been hard at work creating more tools and features to help you build and run your live multiplayer game.

We want to make it easier for you to launch and run your multiplayer game, and we know that allowing you to integrate our solutions into your standard workflow can save a huge amount of time and effort.

With that in mind, we’ve added the ability to upload your game server build directly from AWS S3 buckets. You can now reference cloud storage buckets as a source of your game binaries from within the Game Server Hosting interface. This allows you to adopt Game Server Hosting without disrupting any existing infrastructure, pipelines, or continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows that rely on an external cloud storage solution, such as Amazon S3 buckets. After linking an external bucket to a Game Server Hosting project, you can view, manage, and sync the build files from the Unity Dashboard.

To help you automate your tasks further, we’re also launching our new Command Line Interface (CLI) for Unity Game Server Hosting. The new CLI introduces an efficient and cohesive way to interact directly with Unity Game Server Hosting. You can now use this capability to upload builds and create and manage fleets and servers without having to access the dashboard. This capability not only saves time but also removes the need for manual intervention. It also allows you to automate key processes such as uploading builds as part of CI/CD pipelines and retrieve server information to accelerate testing cycles.

You can quickly perform complex tasks, automate workflows, and do it all in line with the process you have become used to in the dashboard.

​​A great matchmaking service is essential for the success of a multiplayer game. Matchmaker has a powerful rules-based engine that gives you the control to match the right players, in the right place, in the right amount of time.

We’ve taken this a step further and have launched our matchmaking A/B testing capability. This lets you experiment with different matchmaking configurations while retaining complete control and without hurting your live game operations. Using the capability provided by Unity Analytics, you can streamline the workflow to test, evaluate, and optimize matchmaking rules.

In a couple of simple steps, you can configure the match rules you want to test, apply them to your game, and get real game data to evaluate which rules have the best impact. You can target specific player groups by selecting audiences like “All Spenders” or “Churned Players” as defined by Unity Analytics and you can choose the goal metrics that are most relevant to your game, including daily active users, retention, and average revenue per user, to compare and assess the impact of your changes.

This is available now so you can get started with Matchmaker A/B testing. You can also see it in action by checking out our talk from GDC 2023.

To get started with these new capabilities go to the Unity Dashboard, and to discuss them with the team in more detail go to our Multiplayer forums.