GS2-Matchmaking vs Metaplay
GS2-Matchmaking
docs.gs2.io
Metaplay
metaplay.ioSide by side
| Figure | GS2-Matchmaking | Metaplay |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1,000/mo | €195/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 17 |
| Spec score · Game Matchmaking Software | 9.1 (#5) | 9.0 (#6) |
| Company headquarters | The company page lists headquarters at 2-15-1 Shimoma, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan. | Metaplay Oy lists Urho Kekkosen katu 7B, Helsinki, Finland as its address. |
| Company legal name | The maker identifies itself as Game Server Services 株式会社 (Game Server Services, Inc.). | The maker identifies itself as Metaplay Oy. |
| Documentation depth | The documentation includes tutorials, API references, technical documentation, design guides, samples, SDK setup and service-limit guidance. | Documentation includes getting-started paths, tutorials, release notes, sample games, architecture guides and operational security material. |
| Founded | 2016 | LinkedIn lists Metaplay as founded in 2019. |
| Headquarters | Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan | Helsinki, Finland |
| SDK licence | The Unity and Godot SDKs are distributed under Apache License 2.0; Unity dependencies include separately licensed libraries. | The commercial SDK plans use non-publishing or publishing licences; the public Metaplay CLI repository is Apache-2.0 licensed. |
| Support | Basic support is free through the forum, while Business Support is listed at 3,000 USD per month and includes up to 15 hours of support. | The pricing page offers community Discord support, weekday engineer support tiers, and a critical incident add-on with 24/7 availability and a one-hour response SLA. |
| What it does | GS2-Matchmaking groups players according to conditions to find opponents. | Metaplay is a backend platform for building, operating and scaling live-service games. |
Plans
GS2-Matchmaking
- IndividualFree
- IndividualFree
- Professional Service$200, paid once
- Prototyping$1,000 a month
- Business Support$3,000 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- ProfessionalPrice not published
Metaplay
- Community supportFree
- Community SupportFree
- FreeFree
- FreeFree
- Starter€195 a month
- Starter€195 a month
- Pre-launch€995 a month
- Pre-Launch€995 a month
- Standard support€1,500 a month
- Standard Support€1,500 a month
In their own words
GS2-Matchmaking
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.
Metaplay
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.