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Epic Online Services will be launching voice chat and anti-cheat services to all developers for free.
Epic is also revealing its latest social numbers, scaling to over 500 million accounts with 2.7 billion friend connections in Fortnite, Rocket League, and the Epic Games Store.
All of this is supported by Epic Online Services, a set of online tools originally built for Fortnite and now available to all game creators for free so they can easily launch, operate, and scale their games using any engine, store, or platform of their choice.
The Voice and Easy Anti-Cheat tools will further establish Epic Online Services for its backend services for game developers. Operating voice communications and anti-cheat in a popular online game can cost millions of dollars.
By offering these online services to everyone for free, Epic aims to empower more developers to build cross-platform games, connect their player communities, grow the games industry, and realize the vision of the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.
Voice is a new cross-platform voice communication service that empowers developers to integrate in-game voice chat functionality into their projects using any major game engine.
Above: Epic Online Services is launching voice chat.
Image Credit: Epic Games
Prior to its release, Voice has been integrated and battle-tested in Fortnite, offering players a built-in cross-platform solution to chat and play with their friends. The service has proven to provide high-quality, stable, fast, and efficient voice functionality at massive scale, Epic said.
Voice enables developers to offer players 1-on-1 or group chat functionality across multiple platforms, during a match or in lobbies. Connections are established between authenticated users and relayed through the Epic Online Services back-end servers. Epic Online Services handles all the scaling, quality of service, maintenance, multi-region presence, and other machinery of the voice servers.
Easy Anti-Cheat, which joined the Epic family in 2018, is a well-established brand with nearly a decade of experience servicing over a hundred online PC games worldwide. Easy Anti-Cheat is trusted to handle millions of users at peak times. Its long-standing, scalable systems continually evolve and enable all games to benefit from new cheat prevention and detection techniques as discovered for any of the served games.
Easy Anti-Cheat enables developers to get direct control of anti-cheat enforcement in their game and maintain a fair playing field between PC and other platforms. The service seamlessly integrates with Epic Online Services’ Player sanctions and Player reports, and receives continuous updates as cheats evolve.
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