Agenda

Multiplayer games are getting more complicated by the day, yet so much of what studios learn operating them never leaves the building. This roundtable brings developers together to compare notes on multiplayer games networking and architecture, discussing topics such as, how do you technically get players playing with each other? Realtime, turn-based, asynchronous multiplayer — and four players, or four thousand? Peer-to-peer, dedicated servers, relay, or a stateless backend? For realtime, how do you keep simulations in agreement: deterministic lockstep, rollback, or replicated state with prediction and reconciliation? Turn-based and asynchronous play trades all of that for a different set of problems — where authoritative state lives between turns, and what happens when two players act on stale state. How do players find each other in the first place, and how many regions do you run?