PRODUCT

Connect your players with Relayᴮᴱᵀᴬ

Provide great multiplayer gaming experiences with Unity’s Relay service – now in open beta.

Join the beta

Enable great multiplayer experiences with Relayᴮᴱᵀᴬ

The Relayᴮᴱᵀᴬ service allows you to connect your players and provide great multiplayer gaming experiences without the need for a costly dedicated game server. Our service enables easy and secure peer-to-peer, listen-server UDP communications between players.

Get resources and support from Unity’s live docs

Unity’s Relay solution is evolving on a daily basis and you can keep up-to-date with any changes through the live documentation site.

Dive into the documentation to check out the technical references, tutorials, and more to get you started with Relay.

Explore documentation

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Level up with Lobby and Netcode for GameObjects

Relay works best with Netcode for GameObjects and Lobby.

Provide better multiplayer gaming experiences with Lobby by sending service-to-service notifications when a player disconnects from the game and automatically removes zombie players.

Plus, access a reliable foundation for your small-scale cooperative game with Netcode for GameObjects.

Lobby Netcode for GameObjects

“Relay and Lobby work very well together, and they helped our team implement the online features and functions we were looking for in our game. The Unity staff was always willing to help us and will definitely continue to use the service!”

Cristian David Chorolqui, CEO & Founder, Conejiara Studios

Key benefits

A cost-friendly solution to connect your players

The peer-to-peer client server model hosts games on your player’s devices at home, saving you the cost of renting or maintaining dedicated servers.

Simple and automatic scaling

Let Relay do the heavy lifting of automatic scaling for users, scaling to meet your capacity requirements in a multi-tenant fashion.

Secure communications with DTLS

Relay supports DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) encryption of all UDP communication to and from the Relay servers, this enables your users to deliver data that is securely encrypted and authenticated.

Frequently asked questions

What are the main components of Relay?

Relay includes 2 main components:

The Relay Server that is attached to the low-level Unity Transport layer to send bytes across clients.
The Relay Allocation service that works on the backend to enable players to create and join matches via sharing access code.

Are there any costs associated with Relay?

There are currently no costs for Relay and it will remain free for the duration of the beta. Pricing will be introduced once Relay moves into general availability. For more details, please visit the UGS pricing page.

What is the process to activate Relay?

The self-serve Relay onboarding process on Unity Dashboard is available to all users. Simply opt into open beta and click “Get Started” on the Relay Page on the Unity Dashboard.

Will there be any samples available to showcase what Relay offers?

We have a sample that demonstrates how to use the Lobby and Relay packages to create a typical game lobby experience. This sample leverages Relay, Lobby, Unity Transport and Vivox Voice chat. You can find the sample repo and documentation here.

Do users need to use Relay with our Lobby service? If not, what is the benefit of using Relay and Lobby together?

Relay and Lobby can be used separately. However, we do recommend using them together because:

Combined, they improve the player experience by providing automatic disconnect notifications when a player leaves the lobby.
Relay sends notifications to Lobby when a player disconnects from the game, so the Lobby can remove the disconnected player.