Announced back in December of 2018, Online Services is a collection of free and cross platform game engine agnostic services for multiplayer games, as battle tested in Fortnite. Services such as achievements, player inventory, matchmaking and voice communications will be made available completely free. The roll-out is over time, with the ticketing and game analytics services currently being live, with the remaining coming at some point in the future.
Unfortunately there has been a bit of a delay:
As a result of our current prioritizations, several roadmap items are being delayed. Most notably, we are rescheduling the release of the Player Reports and Player Data Storage services. To provide more detail, we are moving the roadmap to a Trello board, which you can bookmark and revisit at your convenience.
It’s not all bad news though, there is one major new change that should be happily received.
We’re also working to open up the identity and social services we built for Fortnite to support cross-play in partner games without requiring the use of Epic accounts or other Epic dependencies.
This should make the use of Epic’s Online Services a great deal more appealling to many developers… once they finally arrive. If you are interested in signing for the SDK click here. To learn more, watch the video embedded below.