I'm rooting for you guys, truly. Congrats on the launch and thanks for offering a free trial.

However... personally I clicked around looking for pricing, found nothing. I understand it's early and you don't have it figured out yet, that's fine. I get it will cost more than if I tried to roll my own solution on bare metal, sure. But how much more? AFAIK it will be somewhere between ten cents and a billion dollars a month, or per player, or cats per donut, who knows.

I'm starting to think that new services silently loose far more users through the uncertainty of opaque or nonexistent pricing ("contact us!") than they will gain with free trials.

If anyone wants to try out a game I made using Hathora for a recent gamejam, you can check out star-jump: https://hpx7.itch.io/star-jump

It's a 2d multiplayer platformer using Phaser[0] for physics on the backend, and it's hosted on Hathora Cloud!

[0] https://phaser.io/

What differentiates this from a more general solution like fly.io? It seems like what’s being provided is an auto-scaling docker deployment with fast cross region network links, and storage? Fly provides all of that, and isn’t focused on gaming. Why would I choose Hathora?

This is really cool. It takes a hard domain — multiplayer — and makes it much more accessible.

I think the docs link is a great intro: https://docs.hathora.dev

Hi HN -- CEO of Hathora here. We've spent most of our careers in infrastructure and are excited to modernize the gaming stack.

Happy to answer any questions :)

I was excited by Hathora and sat down to integrate it into a project I’m working on, only to find that it only supports Websockets.

Given the inherent latency of using TCP-based messaging, it feels odd to advertise this as being good for real time games.

I see that UDP is on the roadmap, so that’s good. Will you support WebRTC for building low latency real time gaming experiences on the web?

Interesting article! Congrats on the launch. But as an ocassional gamer I thought the way online games work was different.

For example, I play FIFA online and I believed that once a match making had place, Player A (me) synced a seed with Player B, and then the only thing that had to go over the network was the input, and every device could generate the game since they shared the same seed (which makes it deterministic).

Isn't much more complicated to have the engine on the server and send the state to the device?

I get that this is a marketing piece, but given the title I was hoping for something a bit more specific to gaming. This is just basic web server architecture.

Deceptive title. Almost triggered me but this looks like a cool project. Hosting game servers isn't as trivial as it used to be.

Back in the day all you had to do was execute a command with a given config. Man, hosting Quake 3 servers was stupid easy. These days I need middlewere such as LinuxGSM in order to deploy an instance of Quake Live. Just one, though... because reasons.

I know why things are complicated these days. I really do. But it sucks

Might be worth a conversation with Glen Fieldlers crew, perhaps a less naive presentation might follow.

Nice read-up, learnt a lot, thanks !

I can't find any details on the actual protocol, and what features it supports.

In real-time multiplayer games, we often need to worry about dynamic latency adjustment, prediction and rollback. Are any of these built-in?

Thank you for the informative and well-article (despite the fact that it is an ad). I'm wondering what difference between Hathora and SpatialOS. As I understand it, they both offer similar benefits.

The fact that the whole domain is down now doesn't instill a lot of confidence in hathora as a cloud provider.

How is this different to say OneQode[0]?

[0] https://oneqode.com

What are your egress charges?

How does this compare to Liveblocks? How would you scale hathora?

nodejs server for games = how to burn your money fast world record

the money people coming telling game devs how to make their servers to become inefficient

little do they know

Is Hathora a product? The blog post mentions a free tier, which is great, but I can't find any references to any pricing or tier information at all, or even a link to buy something. There's documentation showing how to run a dev server locally, but, like...what happens then?

Does Hathora have any customers? It says "scale to millions." Has anyone ever used Hathora to scale to millions of something?

So this is basically a fancy game-specific VPN isn't it? How is it different from Steam Networking which lets players connect to their closest endpoint and routes traffic through Valve's backbone? The only way this service could offer any benefit over Valve's is if you can run edge processing right at the gateway for a Matrix.org-esq protocol for a distributed-authority netcode so that the gameclient's physics/hit-prediction length is only the latency to its gateway rather than all the way to the central authoritative server. But then this would need gamedevs to actually know what they're doing regarding how to re-architect netcode, which, given the quality of Riot's Valorant supposedly being the shining beacon of engineering among gamedevs, is not a very auspicious prospect.

No questions but I love the illustrations on this post. Nice work!

Interesting product; I am also working in this space on a similar concept though geared towards AA/II gamedevelopers.

I didn't get a good grasp, however, of how it compares to something like Photon: https://www.photonengine.com/

Can you enable ShowDead and answer XeonMC's question? Seems like a normal question, not sure how the user got in the spam filter. Happens a lot these days to otherwise normal questions.

The vast majority of games don't work the way you're talking about. I think the only ones that do are fighting games where latency is crucial.

It's much more complicated to only share input because to avoid desync the game engine has to be able to either rollback the state to accept inputs from other players sent over a slow connection, or alternatively just pause the game until it receives the next tick's inputs. See this article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/explaining-how-fighti...

It's easier to prevent cheating if the engine is on the server. Could you elaborate on what you mean by

> they shared the same seed (which makes it deterministic)

In addition to game init params (like random seeds), the game state is also a function of time, which cannot be synchronized the same way that seeds can.

You'll find many interesting videos and articles if you search "netcode". It is easy to underestimate the complexity of domains you're not familiar with, but that just means more fun when you find out how unexpected problems crop up and the innovative ways they are solved.

Your middle paragraph is works fine for LAN, and is how games were programmed. send controller input over the network, compute the next state, send controller input over the network, repeat. But, things get complicated as network delay goes up.

Imagine you put two consoles next to each other with a 150ms delay Ethernet cable between them.

If you always have to wait for your opponent's inputs, a 150ms delay makes the maximum tick rate drops to less than 7 ticks per second.

You can't just start the game at the same time, with the same seed and apply inputs as soon as they arrive. The games would instantly desync, because your inputs from frame 1 apply on frame 15 for your opponent, and your opponent's inputs from frame 1 don't get to you until your frame 15.

ok so just update the engine so that local inputs are processed 15 frames later. that works, but it makes players nauseous. and what if there is a lag spike?

Modern netcode can gracefully deal with network delay, lag spikes, dropped packets, faulty client hardware, and more, while being computationally and network efficient, and can't be exploited for an unfair advantage. A proper explanation of rollback code involves special relativity and time travel. It's so cool. I'm working on my own article and I'll try to send it to you when I'm done.