Indie multiplayer is having a moment. Solo devs and two-person studios are shipping multiplayer games on engines nobody used to market a backend at: Godot, Defold, LÖVE, Phaser, Flame. Asobi is the backend for that wave, and this post is the pitch.
The 4-second version:
Asobi is the multiplayer backend for indie 2D games. Godot, Defold, LÖVE, Phaser, Flame+Flutter. Apache-2, Lua-scripted, polyglot clients, self-host or managed.
What it is
One runtime that handles matches, matchmaker, lobbies, chat, leaderboards, economy, IAP, voting, phases, seasons, and spatial zones. Apache-2. One Docker container plus Postgres. Game logic is Lua (hot-reloadable) or any language that can speak the REST/WebSocket API.
Seven client SDKs are live today: Godot, Defold, Unity, Unreal, TypeScript, Dart, and Flame. LÖVE and Phaser land in May — the README has the live status.
Three things make it work. Matches run as lightweight processes — microseconds to spawn, ~15KB each — so a single node holds tens of thousands of them at idle cost near zero. Game logic is Lua via a pure-Erlang interpreter, hot-reloadable in flight: push a new script and in-flight matches drain on the old version while new matches bind the new one. Every match is supervised, so a bug in one player's logic can't take down the others. On a single mid-sized node: 83K WebSocket msg/sec at 3,500 concurrent connections, p99 RTT 6.5ms.
Who it's for
Solo devs and small teams shipping 2D multiplayer. Turn-based, party, casual, MMO zones, roguelike, co-op — anything that fits over a WebSocket. If your game is a twitch FPS that needs per-match dedicated UDP servers, Asobi isn't the whole answer; pair it with a UDP relay for physics and let Asobi handle everything else.
The five wedge engines aren't a grab-bag. They share a profile: solo-friendly, 2D-capable, indie-first. None of them have a backend that takes them seriously today.
"Does this work for 3D?"
Yes. The runtime is dimension-agnostic — spatial zones take whatever coordinates you give them, and Unity + Unreal SDKs ship today. The indie 2D framing is where we're leading because that's where the underserved gap is. If you're shipping a 3D Godot game or a co-op Unity title and want hot-reloadable Lua matches, Asobi fits — we're just not building the marketing around 3D first.
What's next
LÖVE and Phaser SDKs land in May — the README has the live status. Beyond that: a local dev emulator with a Studio UI is in progress, managed cloud is in private testing, and a content cadence around tutorials for each engine is planned. Specifics will land here as they ship, not before.
If indie multiplayer is what you're working on right now, the Discord is the fastest channel — that's where the day-to-day happens. The code is on GitHub, and asobi.dev/cloud is the waitlist for the managed version when it's ready.
A backend built for indies, on a runtime built for nine-nines telecom. It's a strange pairing. It's also the reason it works.