Welcome to Managed Game Server Hosting (Clanforge)#

Welcome to Game Server Hosting, Unity's scalable game server hosting platform. Game Server Hosting removes the complexity of running and operating infrastructure at scale so your development team can focus on creating engaging player experiences.

Typically, a game developer or studio has expertise in areas directly related to creating a game, such as gameplay, animation, and level design. However, successfully managing the hosting and scaling of multiplayer games can be challenging, along with time pressures to ship your game. This can make multiplayer games difficult to implement, especially if you don't have enough servers to meet the player demands of a game. Game Server Hosting solves these issues for you by offering multiplayer game hosting and a scalable operating infrastructure so your development team can focus on creating engaging player experiences.

Concepts#

In this overview of Game Server Hosting concepts, you'll learn about the following aspects of Game Server Hosting:

• Integration: Start here for requirements, processes, reporting, and best practices to get going with Game Server Hosting.
• Matchmaker integration: A matchmaker is the component you can connect to Game Server Hosting for grouping players together before a game starts, taking into consideration skill and location to give players the best game experience possible.
• Allocations and reservations: Allocations and reservations are at the heart of Game Server Hosting; they're responsible for selecting which servers should host a game session. This chapter also covers their opposite processes, deallocations and unreservations.
• Quality of service (QoS): QoS locates the best region for match connectivity to ensure a stable connection whenever and wherever users are playing.
• Scaling: Scaling technology adjusts your server capacity on an as-needed basis, ensuring you're not paying for servers you don't need. Here, you learn about the differences of bare metal versus cloud servers and how they work together, and the intersection of allocations and reservations with scaling.
• Fleets : Groupings of servers that need to be managed in a similar way are grouped into a fleet. In this chapter, you learn about fleet locations, grouping them into fleet regions, and also how Game Server Hosting deals with allocations in fleet regions.
• Server management: This chapter discusses the operation of servers, how buffers ensure enough servers are up and down as needed, and the selection of the best available server.
• Update your game: Over the lifespan of a game, you are likely to push new versions of your games to your game servers. This chapter tells you how to manage your updates and the different methods available to do so, including zero downtime patching that lets you update a game image without taking any game servers offline.

API#

Throughout this overview, you can find links to specific requests and calls that you can make via the Game Server Hosting application programming interface (API). In these instances, this documentation supplies you with a direct link but you can access and explore the Managed Game Server Hosting (Clanforge) API yourself.