The backend that beats even the best in-house tech

Building server-authoritative multiplayer games traditionally requires maintaining separate codebases for client and server, leading to development inefficiencies and synchronization bugs.

Our pioneering deterministic execution model lets you write your game logic once in C#. This code is compiled to both your client and server. Actions first on on the client for instant feedback and then get re-executed on the server to guarantee cheat-proof results.

With this model, your gameplay programmers are also writing the backend logic at the same time. This is a great way to build complex and highly performant games with large development teams regardless of your game’s genre or target platforms.

Read more in this Game Logic Execution Model Deep Dive.

Modern live service games have complex economies that require specialized tools and workflows to allow designers to iterate quickly and independently from feature development teams.

Our next-generation game config toolkit empowers you to define and modify your entire game economy in your tool of choice and push updates to players over-the-air without new client builds. Beyond the game’s economy, you can use this system to make your whole game data-driven from localizations to in-game content.

Complex game configs need advanced tools for managing them. Our game config build pipeline has built-in features for build validation, diffing, and A/B testing to name a few. We have made custom libraries to digest data from sources such as tabular spreadsheets or JSON files, including support of parsing complex nested and structured data.

You can also add parsers for your own proprietary data sources like custom editors.

Read more about Metaplay Game Configs here.

Working on complex games requires good engineering practices and tools to avoid accumulating endless technical debt.

The Metaplay SDK includes all the tools and configuration we use internally to develop, test and debug it and has been specifically designed with engineering quality-of-life in mind.

For example:

• Run the game server locally with just “dotnet run”. No Docker or database installation needed!

• Use your favorite C# IDE like Visual Studio or Rider with full support for interactive debugging.

• Run your game client in offline mode with an embedded mock backend to streamline development.

Metaplay also includes multiple test harnesses to various aspects of the backend which you can use for your own features and customizations. A load testing framework is also provided for simulating your game’s resource consumption at scale.

Most game backends are black boxes that are difficult or impossible to extend, severely limiting your ability to build the features your game needs.

Metaplay gives you complete access to its source code - from the C# game server to the Unity SDK and game management dashboard. Beyond just source code access, the Metaplay SDK is designed to be built on, with a large amount of base classes and APIs that you can use to build (and not just hack) your custom game features.

As a starting point you can simply build game logic on top of our game server. Then, as the project grows, you might want to to develop custom extensions like integrations to third-party services. At end of the day, Metaplay’s game server is a C# project that you can customize as much or little as you like.

Running a live game requires advanced LiveOps tools for the whole game development team to inspect and manage the game remotely.

The Metaplay LiveOps Dashboard is purpose-built to be intuitive and accessible to your entire game team, regardless of their technical background. It covers all the basics for managing your players, delivering OTA updates and configuring LiveOps content, to name a few. Features include:

• Player support tools for your customer support agents, including tools to view player state and behavior and to apply changes.

• Tools to view and manage other aspects of your game, from matchmakers to guilds to other game features.

• Manage LiveOps: A/B tests, segmentation, in-game events and offers as well as game configs and localizations.

As your game grows, at some point you will need to develop custom dashboard features, such as game-specific admin actions to help with player management. Like the game server, our dashboard ships as source code and extensive technical documentation on how to develop it further.

See for yourself - try a demo of the dashboard in a real live-service game here.

Modern live service games are extremely complex and there is no way to get to feature parity with the leading titles by building it all yourself from scratch.

Metaplay comes with a lot of built-in features for you to develop your game rapidly without compromising on quality. This includes most common features found in top-grossing games from essential systems like customer support and web shop integration to advanced game features like guilds, leagues, and event calendars are available out-of-the-box.

Metaplay also includes a powerful platform of building blocks to implement new custom features after integrating our built-in ones.

All this dramatically reduces the time required to launch a competitive live service game and to evolve it to the top-grossing charts.

Managing server infrastructure for live service games is complex and time-consuming, diverting focus from game development and delaying time to market.

With Metaplay Managed Platform, we can host your game servers for you. We provide multiple environments to deploy to (for example “dev”, “stable”, “staging” and “production”) and take care of maintaining the underlying cloud infrastructure. We have also preconfigured all the professional tools we ourselves use to work with cloud environments, such as user control, observability and logging.

You also have the option to add premium support if you need it. A Metaplay Support plan lets your team talk directly with our core engineering team to help debug complex issues or help prepare for key events like global launch.

For the games that make it big, we also offer self-hosted solutions so that you can own and control all aspects of your game operations.

Any downtime in a successful live game can quickly cause lost revenues of multiple millions and data loss could be catastrophic for the business.

Metaplay server infrastructure has been built for resiliency. A modern Kubernetes-based architecture helps your stack self-heal and automatically recover from most hardware issues without manual interference. On top of that, we have pre-configured advanced observability and alerting tools to let you catch issues early - before they escalate into real incidents at inopportune times.

Additionally, Metaplay ships with advanced tools to help triage and debug issues:

• Remotely collected error reports from game clients.

• Inspect player state & analytics event history from the dashboard.

• Timeline debugger to help visualize complex game logic behavior.

• Export player states from production to your local machine for debugging.

You also have the option to sign up to a Metaplay Support plan to have access to our core engineering experts to help resolve complex live game issues.

Top-tier games need to be able to handle tens of millions of DAU and millions of CCU and robustness becomes paramount as even rare issues happen all the time at scale.

Metaplay offers proven, battle-tested, horizontally scalable infrastructure designed to endure even the heaviest of loads.

With automated load testing, self-healing systems, built-in observability, and the variety of debug and diagnostics tools, you can identify and fix issues quickly before they become real disruptions to your players.

This leaves you free to focus on growing your player base while we ensure your backend is ready for anything.

There is no such thing as a simple top-grossing game. You need a way to accommodate the eventual feature creep without a massive productivity drop.

Metaplay simplifies scaling with built-in frameworks designed for complex features like guilds, leaderboards, and social meta-systems. We’ve taken the time to find polished and documented design patterns in scalable multiplayer game development for you to base your most complicated systems on.

We have also designed Metaplay to be as automatically testable as possible. You can leverage our pre-built CI tools from day 1, run our testing suites to catch regressions and add your own coverage without having to set up new automation frameworks from scratch. You can even use our Bot Client framework to simulate your game at scale to get confidence on the game pre-launch.

Processes that work for 15 people do not work for 150 people. Not even a little bit.

Metaplay’s LiveOps dashboard is designed to bridge the gap between disciplines when working on a live game. The customer support tools allow CS agents to triage incoming issues and deep link relevant error reports to engineer to deep dive into. Game designers can trigger new game config builds and push them out independently of client build cycles. Analysts can manage A/B test rollouts, LiveOps managers can schedule new in-game events, and so on.

The net effect is that Metaplay’s tools make sure your programmers are not bottlenecking routine operations and allows less technically minded people to do their best work with tools familiar and appropriate to their trade. And of course you can run multiple copies of your game for development and testing and move data between the environments to not have to do development in production environments!

Sustaining a live service game requires securing business continuity while adapting to new revenue opportunities. You need proper safeguards against technical disruptions and vendor risk.

We take your business security seriously. Our whole business model and contracts have been structured in a way that makes “rug pulling” (or, hypothetically, introducing new runtime fees) impossible. No matter what happens to Metaplay’s legal entity, you will always retain access to our source code and can continue to do business with our games.

Beyond the legalese, our product has been designed to be self-hosted and, in general, be a well engineered piece of tech that you can rely on. In extremely demanding use-cases, you will be able to look into how our implementations work and either tune or even replace them to get the best possible performance for your scale. Due to the freely programmable platform, you will be able to chase new business opportunities like third-party IAP stores, web3 integrations, or whatever else makes sense for your game.

Traditional game backends often limit your ability to integrate with external services and implement custom functionality.

Metaplay is built from the ground up for extension, with pre-configured APIs designed to simplify integration with any external system or service. The platform's architecture makes it easy to add custom functionality at any level, from game features to backend systems or calling third-party services.

This extensibility empowers you to build both your game and backend with good engineering practices instead of “hacking around” various platform APIs and their implementation details. What’s more, it means that all your systems run in the same distributed monolith architecture that is trivial to develop locally and scale in the cloud as a single, atomic deployment instead of a web of micro-services.

At some point, you need more that what we (or anyone else) had pre-built in to their platform. You need first-party support and workflows for making completely new game features.

Metaplay provides the core libraries and framework while giving you complete freedom to bring your own code, features, and game logic. The platform imposes no restrictions on what you can build or how you choose to build it. In fact, you could think of all our built-in features as just examples on how to work with the underlying frameworks and the actor model to ship highly performant features.

Since anything you can do in programming languages can be done within Metaplay, you have unlimited freedom to create custom solutions that perfectly match your game's requirements.

Of course, you can always enrol to a Metaplay Support plan to get feedback from our core engineers on how to implement your most ambitious plans while maintaining compatibility with future SDK updates.

When you have custom solutions across a portfolio of games, you need to juggle separate systems, tools, and workflows, creating unnecessary complexity and inefficiency.

Metaplay enables studios to manage multiple games from a single, centralized platform. With shared infrastructure, unified tooling, and consistent workflows across projects, Metaplay simplifies operations and reduces overhead. Teams can have custom features and implementation details on their own games, but share LiveOps best practices across game teams, making it possible to share people between projects and quickly onboard new staff.

Most crucially, your infrastructure and DevOps teams will have a good time working with a portfolio of Metaplay projects, with unified environment management, CI pipelines and observability tooling.

When your game reaches a certain scale, relying on third-party platforms for critical game infrastructure can leave studios vulnerable to disruptions, escalating costs, and limited control.

When you're ready to migrate from managed services to self-hosting, we'll work with you to transition from our cloud to yours. Our cloud infrastructure is built on modern tooling like Kubernetes and Terraform, making it portable and familiar to infrastructure professionals.

You'll get full ownership of your infrastructure, and most importantly your databases, which ensures you maintain complete control over your game’s operations, data, and long-term scalability, providing the flexibility and security you need to future-proof your business.