Peer-to-Peer vs Relay vs Dedicated Servers: Which to Choose for Your Multiplayer Game

The choice between peer-to-peer, relay servers, and dedicated servers is one of the earliest architecture decisions you make on a multiplayer game and one of the hardest to change later. Most explanations reduce it to: P2P is cheap, dedicated servers are expensive, relay is somewhere in between. 

That's not wrong, it's just not the full picture.

Whether you're building a 32P battle royale, a 4P co-op dungeon crawler, or a persistent open-world survival game, the actual decision depends on your game type, player count per match, sensitivity to cheating, and how much infrastructure you want to own. This article breaks down how each model works in practice, where each one breaks, and a look into options for dedicated server hosting and orchestration.

How peer-to-peer works and where it breaks

In a P2P setup, one player's machine acts as the authoritative host for the session. Other players connect directly to that machine. The host runs the game logic, and everyone else syncs to it.

This is the easiest model to get running. No server infrastructure to provision, no orchestration layer to manage, no ongoing hosting bill. For a small co-op game like a 2-4 player survival game or a co-op puzzle game where everyone knows each other and is playing in the same region, it works.

The problems are also real and well-known in production:

• Host advantage. The player hosting the session has zero latency to the game state. Everyone else has non-zero latency. In a competitive shooter or fighting game, this matters for players.
• Host migration. If host disconnects, the session ends or needs to hand off to another player. Host migration is solvable but adds complexity and mid-match disconnects still hurt the experience.
• Security. Because game logic runs on a player's machine, that machine can be tampered with. Cheating is significantly easier to implement and harder to detect in a P2P model. In a ranked shooter or MOBA, there is no authoritative reference point you can trust.
• NAT traversal. Direct player-to-player connections require punching through NAT, which fails on a meaningful share of network environments. Your players' routers, firewalls, and ISP configurations are variables you cannot control.

P2P is a reasonable choice for games where cheating doesn't break the experience, matches are small and casual, and your audience will tolerate occasional session instability. Many successful indie co-op games ship with P2P and do fine. The issues above become dealbreakers in competitive shooters, ranked game modes, or any large-scale multiplayer format.

What relay servers add and what they don't fix

A relay server is an intermediate server that routes packets between players instead of having them connect directly. Players connect to the relay; the relay forwards their data to everyone else. No direct peer-to-peer connection is needed.

This solves the NAT traversal problem cleanly. Every player connects to a single known IP and port. Firewall and router configurations no longer matter for session setup. It also removes the need to expose any player's IP address to anyone else in the lobby, which is a meaningful security improvement over P2P.

What relay servers don't fix:

• Host advantage still exists. In a relay setup, one player is still the host running authoritative game logic on their machine. Traffic routes through the relay, but the game logic still runs on that player's device. The relay changes how packets get there -- not who's running the simulation.
• Latency gets worse, not better. The relay adds a network hop. If the relay is geographically close to your players it helps connectivity, but it adds latency compared to a direct P2P connection. For latency-sensitive games this matters.
• Security is still limited. The host still runs game logic on their own hardware. Cheating via memory manipulation or packet fabrication is still possible. The relay doesn't validate game state, it just routes it.
• Scalability is constrained. Managing a relay network for a large concurrent player population under variable load is a different problem than managing it for small sessions. Dedicated servers or multi-cloud orchestration are the typical answer once you're past a certain scale.

The clearest use case for relay servers: small-scale co-op or casual multiplayer where you want to eliminate NAT issues and IP exposure, but don't have the budget or player volume to justify dedicated servers. Unity Relay, Epic Online Services sessions, and Steam's relay infrastructure all cover this for studios already in those ecosystems.

What dedicated servers give you

In a dedicated server setup, the game logic runs on a server machine you control, not on the player's device. Players connect to that server as clients. The server is the authoritative source of truth for game state.

This changes the security model fundamentally. Players can't directly manipulate the authoritative game state because they don't run it. Anti-cheat systems have a trustworthy reference point. Cheating still happens, but the server gives you a foundation to detect and reject it. For a VR competitive shooter, a battle royale, or any ranked game mode, this is not optional.

Host advantage disappears. Every player connects to the same server. Latency differences between players are a function of their distance to the server -- which you can influence by deploying servers across multiple regions -- not a function of which player happened to host the session.

Sessions don't die when a player leaves. The server keeps running. This matters for persistent worlds like MMOs and open-world survival games, but also for competitive games like team-based shooters where a host disconnect would otherwise end the match.

The cost is real: you're paying for server compute on demand or around the clock. You need an orchestration layer to spin servers up when matches start, scale fleets across regions, and manage cold start latency. For a small game with a small concurrent player count, this can be more infrastructure than the situation requires. For anything competitive, ranked, or cross-platform at scale, it's the baseline.

Which one fits your game

The three models solve different problems. Here's a practical framework for deciding:

Use P2P if:

• Your game is co-op or casual, with small match sizes (2-8 players)
• Cheating doesn't meaningfully break the experience
• Your players are geographically clustered
• You are pre-launch and managing costs tightly
• You're building a prototype or early access release where flexibility matters more than perfection

Use relay servers if:

• You want to eliminate NAT traversal issues without the cost of dedicated servers
• Match sizes are small and the host advantage tradeoff is acceptable
• Your game is already integrated into an ecosystem (Unity, Steam, EOS) that provides relay infrastructure at no extra cost
• You are willing to accept the security limitations of host-authoritative game logic

Use dedicated servers if:

• Your game is competitive, ranked, or has meaningful anti-cheat requirements
• Match sizes are larger than 8-10 players
• You're shipping cross-platform across PC, console, and mobile
• You need sessions to survive individual player disconnects
• You're targeting a persistent world or long-lived game server

Most games that move from early access to live service with a meaningful player base end up on dedicated servers eventually. The decision is less "if" than "when" and whether you build that infrastructure yourself or use a managed platform to run it.

Your options for dedicated game server hosting

If you've reached the dedicated server decision, you have several paths. Each involves different trade-offs between cost, control, and operational burden.

• Build and self-host: Run your game servers on your own cloud instances or bare metal hardware. AWS, Azure, and GCP all sell compute directly. This gives you maximum control and often the best per-unit cost at scale but requires a backend engineer who knows how to manage infrastructure, scale fleets on demand, handle cold starts, and respond to incidents. It’s easy to underestimate the ongoing operational overhead.
• AWS GameLift: Mature managed dedicated server platform with FlexMatch for rules-based matchmaking and an official Unreal Engine plugin. GameLift Anywhere allows hybrid deployments across on-premises or bare metal compute, but you need to bring your own hardware and configure the integration yourself -- it's not a turnkey bare metal offering. Pricing is instance-based.
• PlayFab Multiplayer Servers: Microsoft's full game backend platform, which includes dedicated server hosting on Azure through PlayFab Multiplayer Servers (MPS and ships alongside PlayFab's matchmaking, economy, and player data services, making it a comparable full-stack option for studios already in the Microsoft ecosystem. The limitation is infrastructure lock-in: deployment is Azure-only with no bare metal or multi-cloud option.
• Edgegap: Multi-cloud orchestration focused on latency reduction through a globally distributed server network. Works with existing cloud infrastructure and uses per-minute billing. But has no matchmaking, so you're writing the glue between your matchmaking service and your server fleet.

The common gap across all: none combine pre-integrated bare metal, multi-cloud flexibility, and matchmaking in a single SDK without more configuration or glue code.

AccelByte Multiplayer Servers (AMS) is the only dedicated server hosting and orchestration platform that ships with a full matchmaking and backend layer built to work together out of the box and it can also run standalone alongside whatever backend you're already using. AMS gives you:

• Hybrid infrastructure: Deploy across cloud VMs (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and bare metal (Servers.com) from a single interface. Use cloud for traffic spikes, bare metal for predictable load to keep costs efficient.
• Autoscaling and pre-warmed servers: AMS scales fleets up and down based on live player demand and keeps servers pre-warmed so players aren't waiting on cold starts.
• Global coverage: 7 regions, 63 points of presence. Servers deploy close to where your players actually are.
• Integrated matchmaking: AGS matchmaking and AMS work from the same SDK. The full matchmaking-to-server-claim flow is one integration, not two systems stitched together.
• Built-in Observability: Monitor performance, scaling, and cost without external tools. Use Grafana to track crash trends, scaling effectiveness (via claim failure rate), and regional performance. Cost breakdowns detail spending. Live server logs are viewable without SSH.
• Works with your existing backend: If you're already running matchmaking elsewhere, AMS runs standalone. You get the orchestration and infrastructure layer without having to migrate anything.
• Covers persistent servers too: Session-based and long-running game servers run on the same platform. No separate toolchain as your game's architecture evolves. AccelByte has a breakdown of how AMS handles persistent server architecture if that's relevant to your game type.
• AI-assisted integration: AccelByte ships two MCP servers, one for the AGS API and one for the Extend SDK, that connect to any AI coding assistant (Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Claude). Point your assistant at your project with the relevant MCP server running, and it generates production-correct integration code against AccelByte's live API spec without any manual iteration through the docs. For a practical walkthrough of setting this up and using it in a real backend development workflow, this guide covers it end to end.

How AEXLAB runs VAIL VR on AMS

VAIL VR is a competitive VR first-person shooter, a genre where host advantage and anti-cheat aren't optional. When AEXLAB's previous backend was deprecated with 50,000 players already in early access, they needed server orchestration, matchmaking, and a full migration path within 10 weeks. They migrated to AMS and AccelByte Gaming Services in 1.5 months, launching cross-platform with no disruption to existing players - 4 to 12 times faster than building that infrastructure in-house would have taken.

Later, by shifting predictable base load to bare metal and optimizing dedicated server density per VM, AEXLAB cut their server costs by 46% without any impact on player experience. Players continued getting the low-latency matches a competitive VR shooter demands, the savings came entirely from how the infrastructure was structured and allocated.

Where to go from here

P2P is a valid starting point for many games. Relay servers solve specific NAT and IP exposure problems without major infrastructure investment. Dedicated servers cost more and require more operational thinking, but they're the baseline for competitive and cross-platform multiplayer at any scale. If you're still in early development, pick the model that matches where you're going, not just where you are now.

If you’re evaluating dedicated server hosting, AMS comes with a 90 day free trial.