Asobi vs Metaplay

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.

Metaplay is a backend platform for building and operating live-service games. It uses a server-authoritative C# game server with a Unity client library and shared client-server logic. Its LiveOps dashboard includes player segmentation, A/B testing, over-the-air configuration updates, events, economy management, and player support tools. The SDK also includes guilds, social features, leaderboards, leagues, and asynchronous matchmaking; synchronous matchmaking is in active development. Hosting choices include managed Metaplay Cloud, customer AWS infrastructure, another Kubernetes cluster, or on-premises deployment. The platform supports Unity games on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and WebGL, with Unity 2020.3 LTS and later. The free plan provides the full SDK and a local server for local development. Starter costs €195 a month. Managed Metaplay Cloud supports single-region deployments; multi-region deployments are supported on self-hosted infrastructure.