Announced December 4th, 2025, Unity will cease to support their game server hosting platform, Multiplay.
Fortunately, Edgegap's game server hosting platform is easy to migrate to from Multiplay. Thanks to Edgegap's dedicated plugin for Unity, it takes only minutes to migrate. Read our migration documentation here and make the switch before Unity shuts down its internal support.
Of note, Unity has licensed the Multiplay software to Rocket Science Group, a company founded by veterans of the original Multiplay engineering team. Rocket Science's website listed "Late Q1 2026" as the target go-live date for Multiplay by Rocket Science. This comparison will be updated once Rocket Science releases public-facing documentation for their platform.
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;
Edgegap's Private Fleet provides the option to use hybrid orchestration which optimizes bare metal and cloud usage to further optimize costs for game studios while keeping end-user performance ideal;
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 also offers 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.
Unity Multiplay
Unity Multiplay's orchestration, while it offered containers, was based on the traditional fleet architecture. It offered the ability for hybrid orchestration between cloud and bare metal hardware.
Developers had to pay for the entire server, even if they had only a single container running, driving the price higher.
Unity Multiplay's integration process, while complex, was well documented for both Unity and Unreal.
Unity Multiplay benefited from its integration within the Unity Engine's game service ecosystem, and worked with Unity's matchmaking and analytics services, albeit for an additional fee.
Unity Multiplay advertised 99.95% uptime but did not include DDoS protection and offered paid support only.
Unity Multiplay promoted "290 data center locations across the world" but did not offer a public list of locations. Additionally, while it offered pay-per-use pricing, every location had to be individually purchased, multiplying costs for every location added.
Unity did not provide public insights into Multiplay's development. The last release with additional features to Multiplay dated to August 2024, per release notes. Unity formally deprecated the service as of April 1, 2026.
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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 process 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 process for Unreal Engine is faster than any other method, as it doesn't require developers to build Unreal Engine from Source which is the typical dedicated game server integration process for this engine. Both help developers containerize their game server for their project, and deploy it to Edgegap's platform in minutes.
Additionally, Edgegap provides samples alongside dedicated integration processes across major netcode transport including Mirror Networking, Unity's Netcode for Game Objects (NGO), Photon Fusion, 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.
Unity Multiplay's integration process, per their documentation, required multiple steps with little to no automation. First, through the Unity Dashboard, users had to link their project, followed by adding the Multiplayer Hosting package dependencies. Then, users had to manually create a build by containerizing their game server, then create a build configuration including build, game server executable, and query type details. The second-to-last step was to create a fleet, including fleet details, scaling settings, and server density configuration. Only then could users deploy a game server and test their server allocation.
Multiplay's integration covered, evidently, Unity Engine. It also provided an integration process for Unreal Engine. Note that Unity Multiplay's documentation remains accessible as of April 2026 but covers a deprecated service. How this documentation will be maintained under Rocket Science Group is not yet known.
As recommended by their documentation, the next steps in terms of integration process were to add Unity's services such as Matchmaking and Analytics. Both matchmaking and analytics carried an additional fee on top of game server hosting.
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 and storage, and real-time CDN.
Container Registry: Edgegap's registry includes 10 GB, with external registry integration available.
Analytics: Generate insights to optimize your game server, usage and orchestration experience.
Private, Always Online Deployments: Learn how to 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, survival, etc. Providing developers with a cost-effective, fully-managed solution to manage persistent instances.
Unity's Multiplay offered hybrid orchestration (bare metal + cloud) through manual input at the server density step of its integration process.
Beyond this functionality, Unity's Multiplay did not offer specific solutions for multiplayer game developers beyond connectivity to Unity's multiplayer game service ecosystem. As such, the following Unity services function independently of Multiplay and are available to Unity Engine developers using Edgegap as well:
Matchmaking: Unity Engine offers its own matchmaking system.
Lobbies: Unity Engine offers a lobby browsing feature.
Relays: Unity Engine offers a Relay service, which includes only 11 locations worldwide and lacks presence in, for example, the Middle East, Africa, Korea and China.
Unity's Multiplay did not include managed infrastructure. Additionally, Multiplay did not support persistent instances (i.e., running game servers 24/7), making it near impossible to use for games like MMOs.
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 Q1 2026, 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 to select regions as required in traditional orchestration platforms.
Multiplay advertised access to "over 290 data center locations across the world." However, it did not offer a public list of these locations in its documentation for Multiplay hosting (it only did so for its Relay service). As clearly stated through their documentation and pricing, Multiplay used a traditional per-region orchestration model, meaning each location had to be purchased individually.
Given that the service was deprecated as of April 1, 2026, and Rocket Science Group has not yet published a public list of locations or infrastructure details, the accuracy of the "290 location" figure under any future Rocket Science platform is not yet verifiable.
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:
Reduction of players' latency by "58% on average vs. public cloud";
"78% sub-50 milliseconds (i.e., 'real time') latency vs. 14% for public cloud," alongside "91% sub-100 ms latency (i.e. 'sweet spot' for non-eSports multiplayer) vs. 67% for public cloud."
Critically, this ensures a "95% improvement of players' experience" worldwide, which helps game developers maintain 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.
Unity's Multiplay platform did not advertise any latency improvements on their website or documentation.
Unlike Edgegap, which has an edge network, Multiplay explicitly described its infrastructure as a network of "data center locations." Players in cities and geographic areas farther from those data centers were likely to experience higher latency as a result.
As stated in this article, Edgegap's collaboration with a AAA publisher showed that, across 600,000 transactions, only Edgegap demonstrated an average latency reduction from 116 milliseconds to 48 milliseconds, even when compared against a large number of existing traditional locations.
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 req. per second).
This allows game developers using Edgegap to scale and meet the biggest challenge of orchestrators: meeting player demand over a short period of time, such as a midnight launch, a game's addition to a subscription service, or an overnight streaming sensation.
As of March 2026, Edgegap has deployed over 100 million sessions, up 20 million from December 2025 with 80 million sessions life-to-date.
Unity Multiplay mentioned on their webpage that they offered automated orchestration, scaling "the number of servers in your fleet up and down automatically in response to player demand" to ensure "enough capacity available without wasting resources."
Unity Multiplay offered no performance data or historical benchmarks to confirm the level of synchronicity between player requests and deployment response time.
Of worry is Multiplay’s orchestration architected being based on a fleet manager. Which means that rapid scaling can be more challenging since servers can take up to 15 minutes to boot when requested. Even if a server is available, deployment of the game server itself has been reported as very long, with a boot time as noted by an ex-Multiplay user:
"[Multiplay has a] cold start of 16 minutes to boot a server when a request is done!” – Multiplayer developer who migrated to Edgegap
The game developers is responsible to cover the entire cost of every server in every location, whether they have players playing or not.
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.
Unity Multiplay's website advertised an uptime SLA of 99.95% (approximately 4.4 hours of potential downtime per year), which is below Edgegap's 99.99% uptime (less than an hour of potential downtime per year). Unity Multiplay's service status was available through Unity's status page, including an incident and maintenance history for up to 3 months.
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 and Meta Ray-Ban Display.
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 the #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 Q3 2025), managing millions of players and hundreds of thousands of game servers.
Unity Multiplay's dedicated game server hosting, through its Unity integration, supported PC, consoles, and mobile hardware types.
Unity promoted that Multiplay's users could "use the platform that hosts 77 million game sessions in a month" and that its services were enjoyed by "3 million concurrent players." Both of these claims dated to August 2023 per the website reference and were not updated through the platform's deprecation in April 2026.
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 by a cohesive engineering team.
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.
Unity did not share public insights into Multiplay's development.
Multiplay's release notes were rolled into Unity's broader release notes. The last Unity release note with new features and modifications for Multiplay dated back to August 2024 through its SDK 1.2.5 update. All subsequent updates were quality-of-life changes (better warnings, bug fixes, broken documentation link repairs). Unity announced the deprecation of Multiplay in December 2025 and formally deprecated the service on April 1, 2026.
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, disperse the malicious traffic, and even scale up resources if needed.
Unity Multiplay did not promote any information on security, including DDoS attack protection.
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, and supports clients via Slack or the ability to contact the team via email.
Edgegap also provides SLAs on a case-by-case basis.
Unity did not offer support for any of its game services, including Multiplay, by default. "Enhanced support" was only available through its sales team, as part of a contract with Unity.
With the platform now under Rocket Science Group, the support structure going forward is not yet disclosed as of April 2026.
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. No credit card is required.
Edgegap has a clear, transparent pricing for its game server orchestration that is solely based on usage. Namely, $0.00115/min per dedicated vCPU (which is 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 wasted capacity.
Edgegap allows for vCPU fractioning, down to 1/4 vCPU. For game developers, optimizing their game server to 1/4 vCPU results in a final price of 25% * $0.00115 = $0.0002875/min.
Edgegap does not require a commitment, nor has upfront costs, nor does it require engineering support.
Edgegap offers hybrid orchestration (bare metal + cloud), which is available via client request due to the customized infrastructure information required to propose final pricing.
For matchmaking, Edgegap has managed cluster tiers with clear per-hour pricing. Starting as low as $22 per month.
Unity Multiplay's pricing was also based on a pay-as-you-go model.
Multiplay's pricing was more complex, charging server usage across three dimensions:
Hardware: CPU (Core: $0.038 per hour), memory (RAM: $0.0051 per GB per hour), and the OS layer ($0.00 per hour for Linux, $0.046 per hour for Windows).
Egress: network egress fees of $0.14 per GB.
Storage: charged at $0.20 per GiB per month.
Additionally, each of these had to be calculated per location, meaning any estimated cost was multiplied by the number of locations used.
This made estimates challenging, especially given the lack of a pricing calculator. It made Unity's own claim of "[reducing] your hosting cost per player by between 30-40%" impossible to verify against its competition. Of note, this claim referred to a 2023 "TCO Estimator" that was unavailable as of September 2025.
Multiplay's traditional fleet-based orchestration architecture further compounded costs. Unlike modern just-in-time container-based orchestration, fleets charge for full VM usage, including wasted capacity (OS overhead, scaling buffer, unused slots).
Edgegap has detailed documentation that highlights the process to switch from Multiplayer to Edgegap. In summary, you can expect the following steps:
Remove references to Multiplay from project
The first step to switch to Edgegap Arbitrium is to remove the code that initializes the Unity Gaming Services for your server, see the template in the documentation for more details.
You should also unlink your project from the Unity dashboard under
Edit -> Project Settings -> Servicesif your game is made with Unity.
Containerize your game server
Push your container on a repository
You will have to push your container on a repository. You can use Edgegap's private repository or any other option.
Create an Application on Edgegap
Now that your container is on a repository, you will have to create an Application on Edgegap Arbitrium; This Application will represent your game sever.
You need to add the same
portas your Dockerfile to your app version, as well as link the image you just pushed on a repository in theContainersection. This is also where you can add someEnvironment Variablesspecific to your app version, much like the Configuration Variables in the Build Configurations on Multiplay.With only these settings, you can now deploy your server on demand for your players!
Head-to-Head Comparison
Edgegap | Unity Multiplay | |
|---|---|---|
Focus | World's largest multi-cloud edge network, 615+ locations. | Unity Multiplay deprecated April 1, 2026. Software licensed to Rocket Science Group. |
Hosting | Regionless deployments nearest to players. | Centralized data centers; charged for full server even with one container. No persistent/always-online instance support. Service deprecated. |
Regions | 615+ on-demand, single universal price. | Claimed 290+ locations but no public list. Per-region pricing, each location purchased separately. |
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. | CPU ($0.038/core/hr) + RAM + Egress ($0.14/GB) + Storage, multiplied per location. 20-30% wasted capacity. No pricing calculator. |
Engine Support | Native Unity/Unreal plugins, netcode samples, endorsed by Epic. | Deep Unity integration, Unreal SDK available. Matchmaking and analytics were separate paid add-ons. |
Scalability | 40 deployments/sec, 14M CCU, publicly benchmarked. | Up to 16-minute reported cold start. No published benchmarks. |
Documentation & Support | 24/7 support, Discord, Slack, free dashboard. | Well-documented under Unity (now deprecated). Enhanced support only via paid contract. |
Ease of Integration | One-click plugins, no fleet setup. | Multi-step manual process: link project, install SDK, containerize, build config, fleet settings, server density, deploy. |
Network | 58% avg latency reduction vs. public cloud, benchmarked. | Standard data center networking; no edge network, no latency data published. |
Infrastructure | 17+ providers, auto DDoS, auto-rerouting, 99.99% uptime. | No DDoS protection. 99.95% SLA (approximately 4.4 hrs potential downtime/year). Platform deprecated April 1, 2026. |
