Epic Online Services launches two new free services

June 22, 2021
When Fortnite players are able to chat with their friends while playing, we see a huge uptick in player engagement. What if you could supercharge community engagement like this for your own game?

Now you can, with the launch of a new free cross-platform voice communication service from Epic Online Services. Voice is a platform-independent solution that connects your community with in-game voice chat across all stores and platforms.

On top of that, Epic Online Services is offering the industry-leading anti-cheat solution to all developers for free. Easy Anti-Cheat is a powerful feature necessary for the smooth running of any online game with players on PC. These services empower developers to launch, operate, and scale great games like never before. 

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, we aim to empower more developers to build cross-platform games, serve their own player communities, and grow the industry.

Now, let’s dive in and get a closer look!

Voice

Voice is a free cross-platform service for developers to offer in-game voice chat functionality to their players across all major desktop, console, and mobile platforms, using any major game engine on the market.
 

Prior to release, Voice has been battle-tested on Fortnite. The service has proven to super-charge engagement and provide high-quality, stable, fast, and efficient voice functionality at massive scale. Fortnite has seen a peak of 15.3 million concurrent players. We’re excited to make Voice available for developers to offer to their communities within their games.

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.

The service seamlessly integrates with Epic Online Services’ Lobbies—enabling voice conferencing for members of your lobbies.

Easy Anti-Cheat

Easy Anti-Cheat is the industry-leading anti-cheat service. After having joined the Epic family, the service is now free for developers to protect their PC games against hacking and cheating.
 

As a well-established brand with nearly a decade of experience serving over a hundred online games worldwide, Easy Anti-Cheat can be 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 and developed for any game under its protection.

Easy Anti-Cheat runs in the background and prevents common cheating techniques as a robust and ever evolving first-line of defense. In addition to the prevention capabilities, cheats are detected by cross-checking a large database of known cheat techniques, alongside machine-learning processes. Accounts using detected cheats are then listed in the Epic Online Services Developer Portal, empowering you to act as you see fit.

With a range of self-service tools at the fingertips, developers get direct control of anti-cheat enforcement, adjustable at the click of a button. Test and deploy security updates when they suit your game’s development schedule. The service seamlessly integrates with Epic Online Services’ Player Sanctions and Player Reports.
If you're interested in learning more about Epic Online Services, drop us a line and we'll answer any questions you have!

    Ready to get started?

    Learn more about Epic Online Services’ Voice and Easy Anti-Cheat, and download the SDK.