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Comment by dsiddharth | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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?

Not dsiddharth, but for what it's worth I am using Hathora for my upcoming game (it's almost complete!). Their product still very new, but they have been extremely helpful with every step of the process building with Hathora.

They have two products - an open-source dev framework (free) and a cloud-hosting product (paid).

My games will likely never reach millions players, but my first two games led to over 1,000 sign-ups and I've made over $1k in revenue (which I'm super proud of). I can report back with how my newest game does after it launches.

That's really cool - possible to llshow the two games that you've built already with Hathora?

My first two games were built with my own hacky web sockets implementation. From a software perspective it's pretty messy, but it gets the job done haha.

I actually had built an alpha version of my 3rd game with my own networking code, but because it is more of a real-time game, there were tons of bugs. Switching to use Hathora for the back-end logic has made the game much more stable so I can finally work to release the game.

You can check out my first two games here: https://gomobo.app/. They play kind of similar to Jackbox games, but with more strategy board game elements. Would love to hear what you think!

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.

Well, matchmaking and lobby is at least as important as connectivity ; not every multiplayer game requires absolutely flawless connectivity and pings in tens of ms, but every multiplayer game requires some kind of a player profile , and many of those games have a notion of "match", and "players participating in a match", thus requiring a matchmaking based on some rules, most often those are player level and user location. Almost every game I, as an ops engineer, took part in launching and running, was implementing those two parts, with varying degrees of success and finesse

Does anyone remember Microsoft's matchmaking system back in the 90's? MSN The Zone or something like that? It was terrible! :-)

I'm not too familiar with Steam Networking, but at a glance here are some differences:

- Steam Networking seems mostly for peer-to-peer messaging, so it's closer to a STUN server (used by WebRTC for sending UDP datagrams). It's excellent for sending messages over high-quality links, but if you want to run server side logic, it doesn't seem like Steam Networking will help much.

- On the flip side Hathora is a server-authoritative framework, which can run arbitrary game code on our infrastructure. This is closer to a cloud provider. The difference between us and just using AWS or DO is that we're providing the "Steam Networking"-like edge network out of the box and tailoring our use case to the needs of game devs.

- Lastly, we can actually spin up compute infra at the edge if enough of your users are originating from a location far from the rest of your servers. Let's say your game starts to go popular in Asia today, our routing layer is smart enough to launch a server in Singapore instead of connecting users to far away game servers.

You're missing the external requirements a game might have. Multiplatform? Multiplatform with shared online play? Publisher wants certain services? Publisher already has its own services? Service sucks to actually work with?

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.

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