Unity Game Services exiting open beta in June

Unity Game Services is officially leaving its open beta period. The suite of tools and services, announced in October 2021, acts as backend support for developers who have created a game using Unity software.

Over the last six months, the folks at Unity have been taking feedback from a pool of over 54,000 developers. Those developers have used Unity Game Services in over 6,000 unique game projects, which helped Unity reach the end of the beta testing period.

The actual services that form Unity Game Services

Unity Game Services’ exit from open beta comes with a handful of distinct features available to old and new developers. These features include:

Analytics, which allows developers to study game performance and player behavior data in real-time.

Authentication, a tool that can attach an account to players in a game. That attaches all the data generated by any specific player to that player, for easy reference.

Cloud Code, which allows stateless server-side code to be written and deployed without needing to push a full version change.

Cloud Save, which tracks and stores all kinds of player data and supports cross-device accounts.

Economy, which lets developers build out a functional in-game economy and also streamlines in-app purchases.

Relay, a service for secure peer-to-peer multiplayer connections instead of requiring a dedicated game server.

Lobby, which allows players to create public lobbies or set up invite-only lobbies for friends.

Player Engagement and Game Overrides, services which can be used to engage with specific demographics and deliver specific content to players who might find it relevant.

Some of these individual services pair quite well with others — Relay and Lobby, for example — but each will be available on a stand-alone basis. Each service also offers free and paid tiers. Relay, for example, reads as free for up to 50 concurrent users, and begins to charge for numbers beyond that. Lobby offers 10 GB/ month free, then charges $0.09/ GB in the US and EU regions beyond the free tier.

The show doesn’t stop when these leave beta

As these services go live to everyone Unity will be following up with a new set of tools into beta. Aside from new tools ready for testing, Unity will be giving everyone access to Multiplay’s Cloud Platform. It comes paired with another service called Matchmaker. Developers will be able to use Matchmaker to try out new match rules on the fly. Multiplay will be able to handle managing server allocations and relaying all the information needed to get games going.

When you combine everything Unity Game Services offers it’s almost like making a game can be as simple as actually just making a game.