question

If you want to develop a real-time multiplayer game, we would suggest you consider using PlayFab Multiplayer Servers (server hosting service) with PlayFab MatchMaking together. PlayFab's multiplayer server hosting service allows you to operate a dynamically scaling pool of custom game servers in Azure. PlayFab MatchMaking provides a system to help your users find each other. Please check our documentation for more details.

>> Does playfab matchmaking have a lobby? If not, how do I integrate the matchmaking with Mirror's lobby.

No, PlayFab MatchMaking doesn’t provide the lobby feature. PlayFab MatchMaking is used to group players depending on the custom rules. If you need a lobby system, you need to develop the lobby server on your own and host the server builds on the external server hosting service.

Theoretically, PlayFab multiplayer API can be used in any custom server with the other network features. So it can be used with Unity Mirror’ lobby feature together.

I’m not familiar with how Mirror implements the lobby feature. There is not an out-of-box solution about using MatchMaking with Unity Mirror. The specific integration method would depend on your own design. If you meet any exact technical questions in the progress of using the MathcMaking API. Please feel free to let us know.

>> Do I need to keep track of current matches? What would be the best way to do that?

Do you want to record all matches’ status and show them to the players? PlayFab doesn’t provide the API to list all matches in the server, so you need to record the matches, matchmaking tickets on your own. We would suggest to use external cache, such as Redis, to store them.

>> Do I need to use Unity's NetworkMatchChecker to separate the matches?

For clarification, PlayFab Matchmaking has nothing to do with the Unity Mirror’s Matches feature. As our documentation – Matchmaking says “When an individual or group wants to enter a match, your title submits a request to the matchmaking service. Once the request is made, the service will hold on to the request and try to match it with other requests. The service then creates matches that contain players who are most compatible.” The full process of MatchMaking would be completed by our own service.

When you use the PlayFab MatchMaking feature. Clients only need to use CreateMatchmakingTicket to send a matchmaking request via creating a ticket, then they need to loop calling the API GetMatchmakingTicket to check the status of tickets. Once the status changed to the “Matched”, GetMatchmakingTicket would return a MatchId to the client. The clients can call the GetMatch to get the detailed info of the match. If you integrated the Multiplayer server with the MatchMaking, the allocated server’s IP addresses and port number would be returned by GetMatch API.

You can use the PlayFab API with other third-party API methods according to your exact needs.