Google Cloud and Unity Open Source Open Match Player Matching Solution

Google Cloud and Unity have jointly announced an open source player matching program called Open Match that allows game developers to focus on player pairing logic without having to build a complete pairing system for each game from scratch. The Open Match project consists of three core components, a front-end API for the game client, a back-end API for the game server, and a game orchestrator that runs custom pairing logic.

To enhance the connection between players, many games pull players into a shared copy of the game for collaboration or confrontation. Player interaction can maximize the game experience, but player pairing is not a simple matter, Google mentioned, at least technically not easy, requires a lot of input to get the right results, and because each game is unique So off-the-shelf pairing solutions are often difficult to support flexible, causing game developers to spend time and resources over and over again, creating a proprietary pairing system for each new game.

Open Match uses OpenCensus and Prometheus. In addition to metric collection and default configuration settings, Open Match provides highly scalable, customizable pairing logic paradigms that allow for simple gamer pairing based on latency, latency and skill level. Because Open Match runs on Kubernetes, it can be deployed in any public cloud, local data center, or workstation.

Although Google Cloud and Unity developed the Open Match project, Open Match is independent of the game engine and has nothing to do with the game build method and operational infrastructure. It can be integrated with any game. Unity announced that it would add Open Match to its engine and combine with the Unity server so that Unity game developers can build player pairs more easily.