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Comment by Qwuke | Hacker News Reader

My South African cousins have desperately wanted an African Fortnite server. When playing on EU servers their latency was around 200ms on a good day iirc.

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Oh, right. That's not a matchmaking server then, that's a dedicated multiplayer game server. Matchmaking is, to use Wikipedia's definition, the process of connecting players together for online play sessions.

in modern games matchmaking = game servers

which can be confusing

in a lot of games you cannot see a server list anymore, you can only use matchmaking (usually casual / ranked) and the matchmaking handles spinning up servers depending on the load.

They're still not the same service. Matchmaking is about grouping people together for the game, presumably dependent on their geographical location (for latency) and their skill-level (to balance the game), etc. Dedicated game servers, on the other hand, host the actual multiplayer session.

It's similar to the distinction Netflix uses between their control plane (hosted on AWS) and their content-delivery (hosted on their 'Open Connect' CDN).

Oh I agree on the terminology, and I think it's a shame things are how they are (no more active community on games like we see with 2000s games). I was just pointing out that it was so common these days that people mean "game servers" when they say "matchmaking".

Well you could also have matchmaking servers and P2P gameplay without any dedicated servers, which is popular with console games.

You're right P2P is more common on game consoles (Almost if not all Nintendo multiplayer games use P2P, Mario Kart, Splatoon, Animal Crossing, etc...) which in my opinion was 'okay' for a free service but a joke now for a paid one.

I might have expressed myself badly in my previous comment, I simply wanted to say that I've seen a lot of people saying "matchmaking" for "game servers" these days because it is very common and dedicated servers are no longer the norm (sadly).

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