MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
A new report by video game software and services company Unity Technologies has studied how gamers interact with multiplayer games on all of the most popular gaming platforms.
According to their data, 32% of all multiplayer gamers pick Battle Royale and FPS games as their relaxation method of choice, while 31% consider in-game chat features to be a key part of whether they’ll play a game title. They also found a correlation between cross-play and time spent online, finding that games which were cross-play led to longer play sessions.
Alongside these consumer observations, Unity has also shared more details with us about the latest updates to Unity Gaming Services’ Multiplayer solutions, their toolkit which aims to help developers of all sizes to be able to add stable, scalable, and customizable multiplayer to their games with greater ease.
Developers that adopt UGS Multiplayer services for their titles will be using the same infrastructure and technologies as popular online games like Apex Legends, Among Us, and Rogue Company, and the toolkit includes a self-serve dashboard that comes with samples, demos, and guides so that developers can more quickly understand what they’re working with.
The online service tools also aren’t Unity specific, and can also be used with other engines, including competitors like Valve’s Source Engine and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
In their latest iteration, the UGS Multiplayer tools can do things like hosting cross-platform multiplayer servers, Vivox voice chats, lobbies and matchmaking, as well as allowing for game objects to properly synchronise between players’ game clients. They also include networking foundations for minimising input latency and incorporating rollback data functionality – things that are musts for scrappy online fighting games.
If you’d like to find out more about Unity Gaming Services, you can do so here.
