Glossary#

A/B testing

A/B testing is a Unity Cloud Dashboard feature within Game Overrides that splits your Override into variants that you set to see what impact they make on your game. For example, you might believe starting players are given too many coins and are progressing through your game too quickly or stop playing too early, missing IAP (in-app purchases) opportunities. You’d set two (or more) starting balances: the control, and the variant.

Analytics

An end-to-end data and analysis solution designed to support your entire studio. Analytics lets studios easily understand game performance and player behaviors.

Anonymous sign-in

Anonymous sign-in creates a new player for the game session without any input from the player.

Authentication

Unity Authentication provides anonymous and platform-specific authentication solutions for supported platforms, including mobile and PC.

Battle pass

Access to exclusive in-game content for an additional cost, often as part of a tiered system.

Cloud Code

By using Unity's Cloud Code to write stateless server-side code on a fully managed infrastructure, you can focus more on developing your game logic. Cloud Code automatically provisions server capacity based on load so you can ensure that your players receive a good experience without any lag or downtime.

Cloud Content Delivery

Cloud Content Delivery (CCD) is Unity's managed cloud service that hosts and delivers content to your application’s players worldwide without having to reinstall a new version of the application.

Cloud Save

Use Unity's Cloud Save service to save persistent player data (such as game progress) from a game into the cloud, making it independent of device. Because it's cloud-based, players can access their data anywhere and across devices, mitigating data loss when a player changes devices or re-installs a game.

Dashboard

The Unity Cloud Dashboard provides an easy-to-use interface to manage your Unity Gaming Services, including Analytics, Game Overrides, and Cloud Content Delivery.

Economy

Unity’s Economy service provides a way to create, manage and publish an economy system to be used in your game. Includes Currency, Inventory Item, Configuration, and Publication.

Game Console

Console gaming includes Nintendo Switch™, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®5, and Xbox®.

IAP

In-app purchases are items in-game that are bought with real money, such as gems, lives, or weapons.

Identity provider

Unity Authentication supports authenticating players anonymously as well as through external identity providers that include Google Play Games, Facebook, Apple, Steam, OpenID connect and console-specific logins.

Lobby

Lobby connects players before or during a game session with public or private lobbies. You can use the Lobby service to group players together in a lobby before starting a game session or prevent connection loss if a host player becomes unavailable.

Matchmaker

In addition to running game clients and game servers, multiplayer games can optionally implement a matchmaking component, which is the action of grouping players together for a game session. Players running a multiplayer game need their game client to connect to a game server so they can play a game session.

OpenID Connect

OpenID Connect lets players authenticate through a custom ID provider.

Package Manager

The Package Manager in the Unity Editor adds a software package in-game in Authentication, which contains code that lets you track events.

Player ID

Used to identify returning and new players on different devices and external providers.

Platform sign-in

A platform sign-in creates a new player for the game session with input from the player (for example, sign-in credentials like a username and password) and is a sure way to link a player to a platform account. This is done by using external ID providers to enable platform account sign-ins in your game, such as Google Play Games, Apple, Facebook, and Steam.

PlayerPrefs

A class that stores Player preferences between game sessions after logging in. It can store string, float and integer values into the player's platform registry.

Profile

Players can use profiles to sign in to multiple accounts on a single device. Profiles add a level of isolation to the values saved to the PlayerPrefs.

Project

A game in the Unity Editor, that is linked to UGS.

Relay

Unity Relay offers a way for game developers to securely provide increased connectivity between players by using a join code style workflow without needing to invest in a third-party solution, maintain dedicated game servers (DGS), or worry about the network complexities of a peer-to-peer game.

Remote Config

Remote Config is a cloud service that you can use to tune your game design without deploying new versions of your application. It consists of a set of namespaced Key-Value parameters, and you can optionally define a set of values that override or add to these parameters.

REST API

A representational state transfer application programming interface that follows the REST architectural style, allowing communication between RESTful web services.

SDK

Software Development Kit, which can be installed into your Unity project to add functionality, such as the sending of events for analysis.

Seasonal events

Events that are time-based, such as a Christmas season that runs for 12 days.

Session token

When a player signs in using a session token, the token used will be invalidated. A new token will be created and stored in PlayerPrefs. This session token can be used to authorize the player in the future using either anonymous or session login.

Token

When a new or returning player returns to your game, the following tokens are generated:

• A session token - used to re-authenticate the player after the session expires.
• An authentication token - contains the PlayerID, and is used to prevent anyone from overriding it.

UGS

Unity Gaming Services is a suite of products designed to enhance and develop your games, providing a better experience for players.

Unity Editor

A real-time 3D development platform and editor to make creative projects.

Vivox

Unity’s voice and text chat service, for multiplayer communication, offers a voice chat and direct message text service with a managed hosted solution.