This blog post was originally posted on Epic Game's website, "dev.epicgames.com/news"

Studios and publishers have greater ambitions then 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 regardless of the engine they use.

Simplicity & 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 you can now allocate 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 then deploys game servers nearest to your players in less than 3 seconds (1).

The performance improvements are massive and only possible with Edgegap; latency can be reduced by 58% on average vs traditional public clouds (2), and up to 78% “real-time” latency (sub-50 ms), 5 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 support 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

Edgegap is already trusted by multiple Unreal Engine and Unity-based developers, who are using Edgegap technology to simplify their processes and ensure a better multiplayer experience for their players.

These simple steps will help you do the same:

1. Set up your Engine from the Source: Whether you use Unreal or Unity is mandatory to build a game server.

   • Install Edgegap’s plugin – Available for both Unreal and Unity on GitHub. Edgegap’s simple documentation (Unreal, Unity) goes through every step to add it to your project.

2. Edgegap’s OneToken gets you online – From the Edgegap plugin, simply click on “Get a Token” to generate your Edgegap Platform token.

3. Ready, Set, Go! - Click on “Build & Push” when you are ready to test your game server, and “Deploy” when you want to launch it.

4. 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.

In minutes, you now have completed the core steps to get your game server online; automatically cross compiling your Linux server build, building a container with your game server and pushing that container automatically to the Edgegap container registry.

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’s Authentication: Epic Account Services lets you tap into an ecosystem of millions of player accounts, so players can jump right in to 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 economy.

• “Smart” Fleet Manager: For games requiring long-lasting sessions with large player count, such as MMOs. Adding to the massive perks gained from a traditional fleet manager, Edgegap’s “Smart” Fleet learns from players’ behavior to scale and optimize 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.

• 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.

The Epic Online Services features mentioned above are just a sample of what is available. For more information on how to use and integrate those services, refer to their respective documentation pages from Epic Games and Edgegap.

Share & 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. Experience it in action with cross-platform dinosaur-MMO Path of Titans.

You can also check out a step-by-step overview of using Edgegap’s Unreal Engine plug-in on YouTube.

Of course, the best way to be convinced of the value that’s offered is to try it for yourself. Sign up for an Edgegap account to get started, or chat with the team on Discord if you have questions about the service.

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1 Edgegap Technology Inc.

2 Edgegap Technology Inc.; Case Study (2019), Link

3 Edgegap – Annual Performance Benchmark (2023), Link