Asobi vs GS2-Matchmaking

Asobi is an open-source multiplayer game backend built on Erlang/OTP for solo developers and small teams making indie 2D games. It provides authentication, matchmaking, real-time sync, leaderboards, a virtual economy, social features, cloud saves, and an admin dashboard. Developers can build ephemeral matches or persistent worlds with lazily loaded zones. Lua match logic can be changed while a match runs, with updates taking effect on the next tick. Official client SDKs are listed for Unreal, Unity, Godot, Defold, TypeScript/JavaScript, Dart/Flutter, Lua, and LÖVE. Monitoring includes OpenTelemetry integration, structured logging, and telemetry events for matches, queues, and connections. The Apache 2.0 core can run locally with Docker Compose or be self-hosted as a Docker container. Asobi Cloud is hosted on Hetzner in Germany and uses EU-only infrastructure subprocessors, but is invite-only while studios are onboarded. The project is single-node by design and pre-1.0, so minor breaking API changes may occur before 1.0.

GS2-Matchmaking is a managed service for grouping game players by conditions and finding opponents. In standard matchmaking, a player creates a gathering and others may join when they meet its requirements; it is deleted after reaching its required player count. Conditions can include up to five player attributes, role capacities, ratings, allowlists, and blacklists. Ratings follow a Glicko-2-based process, starting at 1500 and changing with game results. Party tokens allow gatherings with existing party members; player tokens last 3 minutes and party tokens last 10 minutes. Season matchmaking keeps gatherings for a specified period and supports up to 1000 players, but only searches by GS2-Experience rank and does not allow players to leave during the season. The service supports latency or region matching and server allocation. SDKs cover Unity, Unreal Engine 5, Godot 4, Go, PHP, Java, C#, TypeScript, and Python. The Individual plan is free for eligible users, subject to request-rate thresholds and a GS2 logo requirement at launch.