Get players into multiplayer games

To get players or parties of players into a multiplayer match, there are several approaches you can use:

Use the matchmaker

Using the built-in matchmaker is our recommended approach for all games. It handles keeping parties on the same team, and can be used for team layouts of any complexity up to 64 players, including cooperative games with a single team. It's compatible with both player-hosted listen servers, and dedicated servers.

View matchmaking documentation

Manually create and join sessions

Once a player has started a listen server, you can create a session which can then be searched for by other players and joined.

This gives you more control over the session listing, but comes at the cost that sessions do not know about or handle parties by default. If you wanted to transmit information about parties to a game server, you'd need to manually implement a beacon in C++ that game clients could use prior to joining.

View online subsystem APIs for sessions