Beamable vs GS2-Matchmaking

Beamable is a game server platform for creating and operating online games and virtual worlds. Its engine-native SDKs for Unity and Unreal connect to a serverless backend for cloud code, data persistence, custom gameplay logic, and Mongo-based persistence. The SDK includes player accounts, multiplayer networking, matchmaking, offers, currencies, inventory, leaderboards, groups, achievements, chat, tournaments, and multiplayer events. The LiveOps Portal supports events, promotions, content updates, A/B tests, player support, CRM, and messaging. Beamable describes built-in analytics and event forwarding integrations with GameAnalytics, Mixpanel, and Amplitude; its marketplace lists services including Edgegap, Photon Fusion, Tebex, and blockchain integrations. Studios can use managed SaaS or private cloud, both powered by AWS. Private Cloud offers dedicated single-tenant infrastructure. A 90-day free trial includes 12.5M API calls, 1,000 MAU, and three microservices. Paid monthly plans start at $125 a month for Developer. Pricing specifies a 10KB bandwidth allowance per API call, with additional bandwidth billed as overage.

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.