[xeonmc]

So this is basically a fancy game-specific VPN isn't it? How is it different from Steam Networking which lets players connect to their closest endpoint and routes traffic through Valve's backbone? The only way this service could offer any benefit over Valve's is if you can run edge processing right at the gateway for a Matrix.org-esq protocol for a distributed-authority netcode so that the gameclient's physics/hit-prediction length is only the latency to its gateway rather than all the way to the central authoritative server. But then this would need gamedevs to actually know what they're doing regarding how to re-architect netcode, which, given the quality of Riot's Valorant supposedly being the shining beacon of engineering among gamedevs, is not a very auspicious prospect.

[dsiddharth]

I'm not too familiar with Steam Networking, but at a glance here are some differences:

- Steam Networking seems mostly for peer-to-peer messaging, so it's closer to a STUN server (used by WebRTC for sending UDP datagrams). It's excellent for sending messages over high-quality links, but if you want to run server side logic, it doesn't seem like Steam Networking will help much.

- On the flip side Hathora is a server-authoritative framework, which can run arbitrary game code on our infrastructure. This is closer to a cloud provider. The difference between us and just using AWS or DO is that we're providing the "Steam Networking"-like edge network out of the box and tailoring our use case to the needs of game devs.

- Lastly, we can actually spin up compute infra at the edge if enough of your users are originating from a location far from the rest of your servers. Let's say your game starts to go popular in Asia today, our routing layer is smart enough to launch a server in Singapore instead of connecting users to far away game servers.

[gopher_space]

You're missing the external requirements a game might have. Multiplatform? Multiplatform with shared online play? Publisher wants certain services? Publisher already has its own services? Service sucks to actually work with?

[YarickR2]

Well, matchmaking and lobby is at least as important as connectivity ; not every multiplayer game requires absolutely flawless connectivity and pings in tens of ms, but every multiplayer game requires some kind of a player profile , and many of those games have a notion of "match", and "players participating in a match", thus requiring a matchmaking based on some rules, most often those are player level and user location. Almost every game I, as an ops engineer, took part in launching and running, was implementing those two parts, with varying degrees of success and finesse

[sgtnoodle]

Does anyone remember Microsoft's matchmaking system back in the 90's? MSN The Zone or something like that? It was terrible! :-)