Multiplayer 101: Your Ideal Tech Stack

[Music] [Music] so i'd like to welcome our final solo speaker of the morning to the stage we've got uh talking about multiplayer multiplayer 101 your ideal tech stack we've got um larry ryan from unity larry so hi everyone uh we're here today to talk a little bit about mobile multiplayer 101 so the tech stack that involves what fantastic games you guys build and the experiences you build as well so i'm larry ryan i head up the global solution engineering architect team my name has changed all my title has changed so many times in the last two years it's hard to keep track but anyway basically we look after the end-to-end customer journey from a technical

perspective right from like hi how's it going through to we'll build it and implement it for you so i've got a lot to cover so i'm not going to go over the agenda i'm just going to dig straight in and the first part i'm not going to cover in any great detail don't worry i won't we all know where we've come from from a history of games but there are some landmark developments in the history of multiplayer that i would love to call out before we dive in and that's because when it comes to multiplayer games the industry the players and the developers needs have all grown and changed drastically over the last few decades let's look all the way back to when i've been playing video games for about three years um yes i am getting old now but i was around the age of eight and the world of gaming was about to change very drastically as much as the slide here outlines the 90s as the lan and couch co-op sort of era there were many trailblazers that helped to shape the experiences we all enjoyed today dial-up internet the mess that it was

opened up the world to a whole new set of possibilities and i remember playing doom command and conquer age of empires warcraft i mean the list really does go on uh but even to like counter-strike the half-life mod that was before the global phenomenon that was counter-strike we played these on dial-up internet and it was atrocious like lag jitter all over the place but it was a brand new thing for us to experience lan party certainly were the place to enjoy many of these titles at their best and as internet infrastructure began to improve in the mid to late 2000s broad excuse me broadband was becoming more prevalent and online gaming was becoming much more accessible than it ever was before so new games sort of appeared on the horizon at this point and we had camp strike which was not a mod anymore but it was a real game now we had dota world of warcraft runescape call of duty again the list goes on but these are the franchises we still play

today and by the 2010 era we all started to have these devices in our pockets sold as mobile phones they were destined for so much more than just communication device they became this [Applause] tiny device well even tinier now but they allowed you to start playing video games they started out as being sort of these hyper casual type games but they started to evolve and we saw this transition most recently in from moving from asynchronous to synchronous type games and they became these real-time real-time gaming online so you've got your fortnight mobile call of duty mobile i'll drop the mobile shadowgun pubg and then among us most recently they've started a whole new mobile gaming revolution and as we step into now we're taking the tentative steps towards new emerging technologies such as vr and ar metaverse is the newest budwors buzzword even and we finally have cross-platform gaming as a reality

and we've got some really exciting pieces of technology that can empower you to focus on the fun as you build your new games and i'm going to take you through some of those here as well today so let's talk a little bit more about the rise of mobile gaming uh with the pandemic we're all living through people are looking for safer ways to connect with one another and gaming for many became that safe space with previously non-gamers looking for new experiences during the pandemic and lockdowns we saw a monumental increase in online players new gamers and gamers alike were discovering new ways to connect with one another and i've got a little bit of data around that because if data is always interesting and in the recent study that we conducted with the harris poll it is focused on the americas territory we found some really insightful nuggets of data 56 percent of americans are multiplayer gamers 91 of those are playing at least once a month 79 once a week 32 playing every single day guilty as

charged i love games uh and with 71 percent of that gaming taking place actually on mobile devices uh with console on pc obviously coming in at a close second and for the first time true cross play was being achieved between pc console and mobile with the audience taking their games with them on the go at least when they could go outside [Music] the divide between mobile and pc console gaming is edging closer to not being a choice of platform anymore it's more about accessibility and it's time that we start thinking about our multiplayer game launches across all platforms as one holistic approach cross-platform in this place can't be an afterthought anymore which is quite often today essentially you're all awesome developers here and you've harnessed the power of these multi-platform multi-device experiences with quality that is actually starting to approach console and the power in people's hands now more than ever it is critical for a platform in a cross-play story

that we look at mobile first as well especially when we have predictions of 2.2 billion games being downloaded by 2025 cross-platform gaming with mobile in the mix cannot be denied uh i think i've said cross play too much now so i'll i'll stick to try and at least get rid of that for the next few slides but the next data set i have here explores the types of genres people want to play and it's clear that casual gaming still reigns supreme in the mobile game space but it's hard to deny here that there is an appetite for more immersive and action-based experiences 46 of all gamers surveyed play mobas on their mobile devices with 39 of rts gamers playing on the go as well gamers always want more i've already said it i'm a gamer i always want more i always want the next incredible title that you guys are going to develop and they always want it to exceed their expectations as well so holding on to the theme of gamers always demanding more from their experiences the next question really

comes down to how do you all deliver them and surprisingly because it's a talk from unity i'm going to tell you how unity can help you with some of these things so we look at the multiplayer tech stack as three core pillars it's the creation of your game it's then the connection of your players and then empowering the player communication and communities off the back of that as well so first comes that spark of inspiration you prototype you work into green light you build your vertical slice and then the culmination of your creativity starts to come to bear in short you're building your next multiplayer like amazing game that comes off the back of that i'm excited because i love video games i keep saying it but i i really do love video games hey mario's on my chest here but what i'm trying to say is i already want to play that new title that you're building and we have a really really strong foundation for you to build on from all perspectives so unity is known for its engine but we are so much more and i'm talking

about the reason why i personally got into games and quite a few other people in this room as well and that's the back end services it's the infrastructure and orchestration required to power your next experience they need to be battle tested and provide a near flawless launch experience for you as possible and for your players as well we power some of the world's biggest games with this tech today and now we're making it more accessible than ever and self-service as well providing services for matchmaking relay lobby fully scalable server infrastructure and orchestration all with consumption-based billing and solution management roll into it as well and one of the things i like to call out which i think is really really important is these services can all be used together as like a single ecosystem or individually driven by your needs so think of this as the you go into a restaurant they give you this big menu rather than you having to go cool i'm going to go for the sort of all-you-can-eat offering you can also go for the ala carte i just want these two items as well and that's how we built

our whole tech stack so with this tech stack we're also trying to focus on allowing you to make an incredible game achieving that intangible factor of the one more ghost syndrome like any game which someone says i just want one more go you know you've got a winner because of people will stay up until the depths of the night trying to play your game again and again and that's in my mind how you win as developers so i mentioned a few different services but let's look at the practicality depending on the type of game you're building we talk about online games they come in many different forms and they have many many different inherent difficult difficulties in the challenges that are presented in how you build them depending on your title you might be considering a peer-to-peer model or you might have requirements for a dedicated game server as well and there are many factors that come into play for your choice the player count what type of player interaction you're building is it cooperative versus competitive do

you need cheap mitigation and one of those things always comes into the mix what is the budget that you have in order to achieve your online presence for your game uh the path you go down isn't a limiting factor i've seen titles migrate from peer-to-peer to dedicated server and in some cases they've hybridized between using a dedicated server and a peer-to-peer model at the same time depending upon the game modes that you're supporting this is the nature of a live service game right-sizing your solution as you grow or iterate your living game to hit all of those requirements and maintain the next excuse me an excellent player experience so we talked a little bit about hosting models how do you actually get players into a session we've got that covered for you with our lobby and matchmaker offerings all that comes down to the type of experience you're building as to which offering is best set for your actual game for lobbies we have lobby codes and they are a popular way and highly efficient

way for getting people into games fast you can actually pass this around social media or you can share it directly by a text message people can just jump in and start playing together and then alternatively we have matchmaking which can streamline the experience for your players giving them really fast access to the action from a pool of players globally and that can all be matched in with quality of service latency and understanding how to group your players based on a certain set of criteria it's the bedrock of how your player involvement actually happens online with and based on the way that you choose the model for how you group your players of what the best method is it will all come down to what you want to achieve as i mentioned and the flexible tooling that we have allow you to actually build this and try these options out while you're developing rather than you having to commit straight away the final pillar that we've got here is communication and i'm going to steal a tagline from one of our services that

i've always liked communication is critical and that's from our vivox product back in the day but for online games cooperative or competitive there's no truer statement and this is proven now that over three quarters of online gamers are using communication platforms to plan the best strategy find friends and settle old rivalries while they game this does come with its own share of challenges though as communities grow from large volumes of people playing together there has been a parallel rise in toxicity as well and that needs to be managed mitigated and we at least need to build some community tooling around how we help you guys manage this within the your large communities that you build so with close to 70 percent of gamers surveys noting that they had either experienced toxicity themselves or that they had been witness to it community safety is just as important as low ping times in my opinion we must strive to provide safe places for the

diverse communities that we build for around the games that we all play promoting a positive environment for our community and your community to grow is essential and we are building tools to help you and your community manage report and reduces toxic behavior as well i hope we'll all be able to share more on this soon but we're not quite there yet it's part of one of our recent acquisitions we're building these tools to help manage that sort of toxicity behavior so summary of the three pillars create your game with a build once deploy anywhere mindset connect your players together and launch your live service game with confidence on battle tested technology letting you focus on building your next amazing game and then allow them to build safe communities empowering them with the ability to communicate cross-platform with ease i do have some other little nuggets of data as well just because if i thought you guys might like more data i'm not going to read all these numbers here but i don't think it comes as any surprise that players want lightning

slightly fast matchmaking easy matchmaking with their friends or matching with their friends cheating is bad funny that it's also a form of toxicity from another way of looking at it and making online friends should be easy provided it's safe and they want tools to help build those communities as well gamers mostly just want to play they don't want to deal with toxicity adding features to help your communities to curtail this is a must ultimately the list goes on but the right blend of tools and services can help craft a truly incredible game for your players to experience talking of tools we have some others here for you as well that focus on different stages of your games like development life cycle i won't go too deep into these but just to give you an idea these are developer-focused services to help hone your new title using analytics to really understand what your players are engaged with and more importantly what they're not allowing you to focus on what to build next to keep your audiences engaged

then use our content delivery network to a b deploy and test these different scenarios that you build out to find out which work the best but also to see which ones work in which geographies as well and you can actually split out your experiences in the way that you deploy to test in different geographies as well excuse me and then the final one which can be kind of bifurcating in any audience is monetization you've built your amazing game you've built your monetization organically alongside it and that allows you to continue to fund new titles and future development of your existing tiles the one thing i don't have on this board is our fantastic consultancy team they actually come in they will tear down games not just from an economy perspective but also from a game loop from a scalability perspective they want to help unders you understand what's going on inside your game and how you can maximize its potential you're hoping i'm done by now and i'm nearly there but i just got a few other short items to go

through with so many components we wanted to create an ecosystem where they can be used harmoniously or individually we've talked about this ecosystem ugs it's called unity game services it's a solution that's free to get started on test out and then make the best decisions for your next title these services and tools are only the beginning i'm going to show you a slide that's a bit overwhelming oh they made it better so okay fair enough but from voice and text communications economy management dedicated service solutions and analytics remote config flat content delivery mediation and in-app purchases there's a lot there's a lot going on and there's more that we can't share just yet and our main goal at unity in 2022 is to invest in building the ideal tech stack for multiplayer game developers and we all know that unit's horrible when it's going away it's been deprecated too early et cetera but we made a major milestone in the last quarter of last year

towards building netcode for game objects and that's continuing to evolve as well at unity we've always talked about the democratization of game development presenting you with an engine to innovate and iterate with and with ugs we are building on that ethos and folding it into all of the services you need to bring a multiplayer experience to your players just as gaming is always evolving so is the way we build we are truly excited to see what you can all create as you embrace these offerings and i know together that we can empower your success just uh yeah thank you for listening please come and say hi if you'd like and more people and most importantly keep making amazing games thank you larry that that was great and a real as you kind of summarized their important reminder that the um unity is you know not just the game engine that powers so many games it's like 60 of all games like that sixty seventy eighty penny you ask yeah

yeah but also all the behind the scenes services as well so that's great um does anyone we've got a couple of minutes does anyone have any questions for larry while we're here there we go here we go thank you hi larry hi there can you give examples of a few games that are using the unity tech stack for multiplayer completely completely end-to-end cross-platform ideally i think because where ugs is as a platform that ecosystem only became sort of closed alpha and then beta last year most of the games are being developed on top of it right now they're not launched yet as we move from this perspective of like i've heard different connotations of mobile games can be made in three months when you're building a multiplayer experience i don't think that's the case anymore especially on the more sort of real-time type games so i can't say any today but there are ones that are being developed on it and i would expect to see them in the next like 18 months to three years

great thank you thank you for your question um what i suggest is if anyone has any questions to follow up with the larry or the unity team they seek them out uh here look them up on meet to match or find them online so look again thank you very much larry thank you everyone [Music] [Music] you