Announced March 4th, 2026, Hathora will cease to support their game server hosting platform, hathora.dev with official support ending May 5th.
Fortunately, Edgegap's game server hosting is easy to migrate to. Read our migration documentation here and make the switch before Hathora shuts down its platform.
Edgegap currently and Hathora (prior to its shutdown) offers container-based, dedicated game server hosting orchestration.
What sets them apart?
Edgegap
Edgegap offers a modern, highly optimized, multicloud game server orchestration on the world's largest edge network, which enables multiplayer game developers to:
Ensure consistent end user experience with instant, regionless access to all of Edgegap's 615 locations worldwide (and counting) on-demand;
Deliver low latency online experience for its players with a 58% average reduction vs. public cloud;
Rapid scaling with a confirmed, consistent 40 deployments per second for 60 minutes reaching 14 million concurrent users ("CCU") in that time span, with more possible over time;
High resiliency with the ability to instantly redirect deployments across its 17+ providers (cloud and bare metal) with guaranteed 99.99% uptime.
Edgegap's platform is accessible to anyone and can be tested with a free account which includes the essential resources to help game developers get started.
Edgegap's approach enables game studios to deploy to all its cloud locations worldwide at a single, universal price based on 100% compute usage.
Edgegap's Private Fleet provides the option to use hybrid orchestration which optimizes bare metal and cloud usage to further minimize costs for game studios, alongside an easy-to-integrate, fully managed matchmaking system.
Edgegap prides itself on its easy and short integration process ("get your game online in minutes") including its compatibility through easy-to-use plugins, samples, and integrations with major game engines (Unity, Unreal) and tools most used by game developers (e.g., Heroic Labs Nakama, Mirror Networking, PlayFab, Photon Fusion, etc.; often endorsed by the original creators themselves), for an even easier integration process.
Edgegap is constantly updated, with releases every two weeks on average including new features, platform improvements, and bug fixes.
Hathora
Hathora was acquired by Fireworks AI in March 2026. Its game hosting platform was frozen immediately upon acquisition and permanently shut down on May 5, 2026.
Unlike Edgegap, Hathora did not offer a public-facing platform. It required developers to contact Hathora's sales team and imposed on game developers to contractually hire Hathora's engineers for its paid tiers.
Hathora's orchestration leveraged a network that included bare metal and cloud providers. It listed 14 regions worldwide, with a heavy emphasis on the United States where 5 of its 14 locations (35%) were located.
Hathora's scalability was not backed by any publicly available data.
Hathora's latency-reduction claims were not backed by any publicly available data.
Hathora did not share its availability claims but did have a public status page.
Hathora had a plugin for integration in Unity, and guides for integration in Unreal and Photon.
Hathora shared monthly "changelogs" which highlighted its platform's improvements since April 2023.
Hathora did not share publicly its usage-based pricing, nor the pricing of any of its features.
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Initial Setup & Integration
Edgegap's documentation and videos highlight the orchestration platform's simple integration process and demonstrate how fast it can be achieved.
Edgegap provides integration for both Unity Engine and Unreal Engine. Specifically for Unity, it offers a plugin which enables developers to containerize and deploy a game server directly from Unity's editor. Edgegap's "build from container" integration for Unreal Engine is faster than any other method, as it does not require developers to build Unreal Engine from Source --- the typical dedicated game server integration process for this engine. Both help developers containerize their game server and deploy it to Edgegap's platform in minutes.
Additionally, Edgegap provides samples alongside dedicated integration processes across major netcode transports including Mirror Networking, Unity's Netcode for Game Objects (NGO), Photon Fusion, and Fish-Networking ("FishNet"). This also includes major game services and backend tools such as Heroic Labs' Nakama, Microsoft's PlayFab, Epic Games' Epic Online Services, Pragma Engine, and Beamable.
Edgegap provides game developers with the flexibility to choose which container registry they want to use, including Edgegap's own container registry, but also external solutions such as Docker Hub, GitLab, Google Cloud's Registry, and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
Once a game server is deployed, Edgegap offers a highly intuitive user experience. Every user can quickly oversee its deployment on its dashboard. For more insights, Edgegap offers an Analytics dashboard which provides details on monitoring releases with live server count per version and resource usage overview, including CPU-related and memory insights, alongside networking insights to detect inefficient networking patterns and optimize netcode performance.
Hathora’s platform functions through a room-based deployment mechanism. After containerizing a game server (“process”), tied to a specific build, Hathora deploys a room which is a “1:1 with processes”.
While Hathora’s room system can appear effective on paper, offering, for example, game studios to launch multiple matches in a single room; the room system’s logic is not available out-of-the-box with Hathora and must be developed by the game studio.
In terms of setting up their game server, developers begin their Hathora journey with the same step as Edgegap: a game server upload through a container. Then, the server deployments must be configured manually, instead of automatically. Finally, once the setup is complete, the game client must call deployment in the room request to activate the game’s room on Hathora’s network.
To help with integration, Hathora has a single Unity engine integration whose last update is listed as March 2025. It also has a Photon sample. Hathora does not provide samples for Mirror Networking, Fish-Networking and Unity for Game Objects.
Hathora’s onboarding guide to Unreal states Hathora still requires building Unreal Engine for Source, a process known for taking hours (where even community guides are available to provide tips on making it a shorter process) and is know to often fail during the process.
Hathora, in addition to hosting usage costs, charges studios for integration process wit their engineers, and forces a monthly support agreement.
Hathora has guides for integration with backend solutions. This includes Pragma.gg, which is also backed by the same Venture Company as Hathora, Upfront Ventures. Additionally, it has guides for EOS, Nakama, and Beamable.
Products
Beyond dedicated game servers, Edgegap offers a range of solutions to help multiplayer game developers, including:
Matchmaking: Group players easily and launch games instantly. A fully managed, infinitely customizable matchmaking system to optimally group players worldwide.
Managed Clusters: Managed Clusters make hosting self-managed game services and game backend easy and fast.
Managed Infrastructure: Easily and cost-effectively run all backend services in Edgegap's fully managed clusters, including managed Kubernetes, managed databases & storage, and real-time CDN.
Container Registry: Edgegap's registry includes 10 GB, with external registry integration available.
Analytics: Generate insights to optimize game server usage and orchestration experience.
Private, Always Online Deployments: Enable persistent worlds with 24/7 always online deployments. Ideal for multiplayer experiences such as social games and MMOs.
China Deployments: Leverage the same platform worldwide. Availability is pending regulatory, country-specific compliance in this market.
Hybrid Orchestration (Bare Metal + Cloud): For committed studios with predictable traffic, leverage Bare Metal for low-tide traffic to optimize costs, and seamlessly scale with Cloud for traffic spikes.
Fleet Manager ("Private Fleet"): Edgegap's fleet-based orchestration for games with persistent servers such as MMOs, social, and survival games. Providing developers with a cost-effective, fully-managed solution to manage persistent instances.
Hathora's primary service was its game server orchestration. Additionally, it offered:
UBA: A build development tool.
Fleets: Scaling game servers across regions. This required Hathora's "Pro" paid tier.
Analytics: In-depth telemetry. This required Hathora's "Enterprise" paid tier.
Hathora did not have a matchmaking system, even though it is described as a "critical component of the matchflow that ensures players are paired into games in a fair, efficient, and scalable way" and was listed as part of its match flows architecture. Studios using Hathora were required to purchase and integrate a matchmaking system separately.
Performance (Distribution, Latency Reduction, Scalability & Resilience)
Distribution
Edgegap's modern, regionless orchestration platform is built from the ground up to provide a multi-tenant environment. Each studio can manage multiple productions within a single, geographically distributed, and highly available environment.
Edgegap prides itself on leveraging its patented orchestrator on the world's first, and largest, edge network built for multiplayer game server hosting. It includes, as of writing, 615 locations worldwide across 17+ cloud and bare metal providers, all available to deploy game servers on-demand.
Edgegap's platform instantly distributes multiplayer games worldwide without the need for selecting regions like in traditional orchestration platforms.
Hathora, as of its shutdown announcement in March 2026, listed 14 regions worldwide across cloud and bare metal providers. It was heavily US-centric, with five of its fourteen locations based in the USA (i.e. 35% of overall distribution).
Hathora distributed game servers to all its regions and "will allocate it to an existing process if it has capacity" in its network, which could indicate limited server capacity or "noisy neighbour" impacts on scalability.
Latency
Edgegap's platform, using its patented decision-making algorithm and the world's largest edge network, deploys game servers closest to users. This enables game developers to deliver:
"78% sub-50 milliseconds (i.e., real-time) latency vs. 14% for public cloud", alongside "91% sub-100 ms latency vs. 67% for public cloud."
Critically, this ensures a "95% improvement of players' experience" worldwide, which helps game developers ensure a consistent end user experience including traditionally challenging markets such as Oceania and Asia. Additionally, it helps game developers avoid static, region-locked matchmaking, which helps increase match quality for players.
Hathora had 14 locations worldwide. It claimed to help reduce latency through "optimal server placement near players" and "traffic routing through a private backbone." Its documentation claimed to use a "premium edge network" to reduce latency despite using major public cloud and bare metal providers. Hathora offered no data on its latency-reduction claims, and did not share case studies or real-world data to support these claims.
As stated in this article, Edgegap's collaboration with a AAA publisher showed that, by using traffic from 600,000 transactions and comparing results with a AAA studio's existing architecture, only Edgegap demonstrated an average latency reduction from 116 milliseconds to 48 milliseconds.
Scalability
Edgegap's performance benchmark proves its orchestration can consistently scale at 40 deployments per second, sustained for 60 minutes, for a total of 14 million concurrent users ("CCU") worldwide. Stacking two of such instances on Edgegap's platform allows game developers to manage as much traffic as Fortnite had during their peak launch (100 requests per second).
As of Q1 2026, Edgegap's platform has deployed over 100 million sessions lifetime, demonstrating sustained production-scale performance at the platform level.
This allows game developers using Edgegap's orchestration to meet the biggest scaling challenge of orchestrators: satisfying player demand over a short period such as a midnight launch, a game's addition to a subscription service, or an overnight surge in popularity.
Hathora did not share any data about its scaling abilities to support its "lightning fast" capability claims.
Resilience
Edgegap's vast network telemetry allows it to detect issues with sites or providers, such as outages, and instantly redirect deployments across its 17+ providers across cloud and bare metal.
Edgegap's platform has been running live 24/7 for the past six years, maintaining over 99.99% availability.
Hathora did not make claims about its availability or resilience on its main website. Hathora did have a public-facing status page.
Platforms & Adoption
Edgegap's dedicated game server and various integrations ensure the platform supports all game hardware types, such as PC, consoles (PlayStation, XBOX, Nintendo Switch), VR, mobile, web-based (HTML5, WebGL, etc.), alongside new devices such as extended reality ("XR") devices including Apple's Vision headsets and META's AI glasses such as Ray-Ban Meta.
Edgegap is part of Nintendo's Switch developer portal alongside PlayStation's Partner Program.
Edgegap is the sole orchestrator endorsed by Epic Games, makers of Unreal Engine, through its Epic Online Services.
In terms of games, Edgegap currently manages live games from AAA titles to indie projects alike. Current AAA games running on Edgegap include (as of Q1 2026) the PAYDAY franchise, 7 Days to Die franchise, VR powerhouse Ghost of Tabor, massively popular The Isle, KRAFTON, Halfbrick Studios, Sinn Studios, AONIC, and MegaBits Publishing, alongside challengers such as top-10 CrazyGames multiplayer "Drift.io" by Slipstream Games and #1 MENA-region application "WOLF Qanawat". Case studies for certain of these games are available to read.
Over 1,600 studios have used Edgegap's platform (as of September 2025), and managed millions of players and hundreds of thousands of game servers.
Hathora worked with game studios primarily developing console and PC games.
Its highest-profile clients included 1047 Games' Splitgate 2, Mountaintop Studios' Spectre Divide, and Frost Giant Studios' Stormgate. Stormgate's developer announced the game would be patched for offline play, with online modes dependent on finding a new infrastructure partner.
Development
Edgegap, based in the region of Montréal, Canada, promotes its high-quality development and operations. Its product, development, and operations teams employ robust processes, including roadmap strategy, agile methodology, QA, and strict code reviews. Its CI/CD pipeline spans development, staging, and production environments, resulting in a high-quality platform with strong availability. The orchestrator's production is entirely in-house from Edgegap's office in the region of Montréal.
Edgegap consistently releases updates through sprints, maintaining a cadence of a release every two weeks on average, introducing new features, improvements, and bug fixes each time. All listed in its release notes.
Hathora was founded in 2020. It did not provide insights into its development process. On its blog, Hathora shared monthly "changelogs" about its platform since April 2023.
Security & Support
Security
Edgegap advertises its automated protection against hackers with instant DDoS attack protection.
Whenever Edgegap detects abnormal traffic patterns indicative of DDoS attacks in real time, the platform automatically redirects traffic away from the targeted server, disperses the malicious traffic, and can even scale up resources if needed.
Hathora promoted its ability to "defend against DDoS attacks". However, its DDoS protection feature was locked behind its highest-cost pricing tier ("Enterprise"). Studios on lower tiers had no DDoS protection included.
Support
Edgegap's client support is free and includes 24/7 on-call engineers for games with live traffic. It has a client support dashboard.
For integration support, or ongoing conversations with clients, Edgegap has a public Discord server, or supports clients via Slack or the ability to contact its team via email.
Edgegap also provides SLA on a case-by-case basis.
Hathora's paid clients had access to "24/7 access to our on-call" support, though this was tiered. "Pro" clients were limited to business hours support only. "Enterprise" clients were the only ones with 24/7 priority support. Hathora promoted support via phone, email, and Slack.
Edgegap provides access to its platform with a free account. This includes a free trial with the essential resources to help game developers get started. It does not require a credit card.
Edgegap has clear, transparent pricing for its game server orchestration that is solely based on usage: $0.00115/min per dedicated vCPU (fractionable) and $0.10/GB of monthly Network Egress, as of Q1 2026. Edgegap's pricing is 100% for compute, unlike traditional orchestration which has 20-30% wasted capacity.
Edgegap allows for vCPU fractioning down to 1/4 vCPU. For example, a game server optimized to run at 1/4 vCPU results in a final price of 25% × $0.00115 = $0.0002875/min.
Edgegap's Edge Cloud does not require a commitment, nor has upfront costs, nor does it require engineering support.
Edgegap offers hybrid orchestration (bare metal + cloud) starting at $250/month for private hosts. Commitment is limited to one month.
For matchmaking, Edgegap has managed cluster tiers with clear per-hour pricing, starting as low as $22 per month.
At the time of its shutdown, Hathora had three tiers of pricing:
"Explore" was their free tier, intended to help developers "integrate and evaluate."
"Pro" was for game studios in "develop & playtest" mode. It removed free-tier limitations. Usage-based pricing for the Pro tier was not publicly communicated ("Contact us for rates" was stated on their website). It unlocked access to its fleet manager and business-hours support.
"Enterprise" was for game studios ready to scale for launch. In addition to Pro-tier features, it added "Bare Metal reservations," DDoS protection, and 24/7 support. Usage-based pricing for the Enterprise tier was also not communicated publicly.
Hathora did not publicly share information on the pricing model for its UBA tool.
Hathora required clients to sign a contract to access its platform. As part of the contractual agreement, Hathora required the client to pay both an integration fee alongside a mandatory monthly engineering support cost.
Hathora, like Edgegap, is a container-based orchestration platform, which facilitates the migration process.
Make sure to refer to our “Switching from Hathota to Edgegap” documentation for the latest updates to this process.
If you are looking to migrate your multiplayer game from Hathora to Edgegap's game server hosting & orchestration, the following simple steps will get you running in no time.
Before getting started, we expect that:
You currently use Hathora, and;
You currently have a working server build.
If not, here's our guide for Unreal Engine and Unity which will get your server running in 5-20 minutes.
Step 1: Identify & Replace Hathora Features
Review and identify services and features you currently use in Hathora to be replaced with Edgegap equivalents.
Hathora - Feature | Edgegap - Feature |
|---|---|
Authentication | Optionally, add fine-grained access controls: |
Hosting CLI | No CLI required! Use our Dashboard or automate builds with API. |
Create a Build | Try our quickstart tools - Unity / Unreal Engine. |
Hathora Lobbies |
|
Fleet | Private Fleets with Persistence and Cloud Overflow. Optionally add later on, or default to Match-Bound cloud. |
Eager Caching (Pro, Enterprise) - 3 seconds deployments | Active Caching (Pay as you Go) - 0.5 second deployments |
Ping Service (Regions) | Ping Beacons (automated in engine-specific SDKs) |
Telemetry (Analytics) |
Step 2: Backend Integration
The next step is to ensure your backend integration functions with Edgegap's orchestration.
Fortunately, Edgegap's platform has clear and simple integration references for all services previously supported by Hathora, namely:
Pragma (see: joint case study)
Alongside custom backends
Edgegap has additional integration path, including but not limited to, BrainCloud, Loot Locker, Invokation Games, XSOLLA backend, Network Next, and more.
Step 3: (Optional) Setting up Fleets
Edgegap also offers an optional feature, similar to Hathora’s fleets, with Edgegap’s “Private Fleet” of persistent servers with the ability to burst to cloud servers. Discover our Fleet Manager for persistent servers.
Head-to-Head Comparison
Edgegap | Hathora | |
|---|---|---|
Focus | Leverages edge computing through the world's largest multi-cloud network for optimized latency and performance. | ⚠ Platform shut down May 5, 2026. Offered game server hosting orchestration in limited locations with optional network acceleration. Acquired by Fireworks AI in March 2026. |
Hosting | Distributed, regionless edge deployments nearest to players to minimize latency and improve the multiplayer experience. | Centralized cloud and bare metal servers. Platform no longer accepting new clients. Support ends May 5, 2026. |
Regions | 615+ locations across 17+ cloud and bare metal providers worldwide — all available on-demand at no extra cost. | 14 regions worldwide, with 35% (5 of 14) in the US. No coverage in Africa or the Middle East. |
Pricing Model | Transparent pay-as-you-go: $0.00115/min per vCPU. No contracts, no upfront costs, no credit card required for free account. For persistent servers, private hosts starts at $250/month, with only 1-month commitments. | Pricing was never publicly disclosed. Required a signed contract, an upfront integration fee, and a mandatory monthly engineering support agreement. |
Engine Support | Native plugins for Unity and Unreal editors. Samples for Mirror, NGO, Photon Fusion, FishNet and more. Endorsed by Epic Games via Epic Online Services. | Unity plugin. Unreal required building from Source. No Mirror, NGO, or FishNet samples. |
Scalability | Benchmarked at 40 deployments/sec sustained for 60 minutes, reaching 14M CCU. Sub-3 second cold start. | No public scalability data. |
Documentation & Support | Comprehensive documentation, 24/7 on-call support for live games, Discord community, Slack, and a free client support dashboard. | Monthly changelogs. 24/7 priority support was limited to Enterprise tier only; Pro clients were restricted to business hours. |
Ease of Integration | "One-click" plugin for Unity and Unreal editors. Video tutorials for major engines, netcodes, and backend tools. No mandatory engineering hiring. | Manual room-based configuration required. Integration contractually required hiring Hathora's own engineers at an additional cost. |
Network | The world's largest edge network, proven to reduce latency by 58% on average vs. public cloud. | Claimed a "premium edge network" via AWS Global Accelerator. No benchmarks or case studies were provided to support latency-reduction claims. |
Infrastructure | 17+ providers (cloud and bare metal). Automated DDoS protection included at no cost. 99.99% guaranteed uptime. | DDoS protection was available at Enterprise tier only. No uptime SLA was advertised. Platform shut down May 5, 2026. |
