PlayFab For Unreal v3.1.3 Released

PlayFab for Unreal helps Unreal Engine game developers build for XBOX and span cross-platform capabilities directly within their engine & editor.

September 17, 2026

The systems behind a multiplayer game are the foundation of the experience players remember: signing in, finding friends, grouping up, talking to each other, and having their progress follow them wherever they play. When those work well they disappear, and what is left is the game people keep coming back to. The hard part is that they are expensive to build, run and keep working on every platform you ship on.

Unreal Engine has a standard way for games to ask for those things, called the Online Subsystem, and PlayFab for Unreal Engine is the plugin that connects it to PlayFab. It lets a studio use PlayFab for accounts, lobbies, matchmaking, voice, and leaderboards while writing normal Unreal code, and use that same code on Xbox, PC, Steam Deck, PlayStation, and Switch. One online layer to build and maintain instead of one for every platform, which means less engineering time, lower ongoing cost, and more of the team free to work on the game itself.

Today we're shipping 3.1.3 (GA), and the theme is straightforward: your players can stay with their friends while they jump in and out of matches, the way they already expect games to work.

Where you can ship it today

PlayFab for Unreal Engine (v2 Unified) is production ready on five platform families:

Support for additional platforms is in development. If your project needs a platform that v2 doesn't cover yet, use the v1 Unreal plugin instead, since v1 and v2 cannot be used together in the same project.

  • Windows, both desktop PC and handheld
  • Xbox, including Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, and Cloud
  • Steam Deck
  • PlayStation, both PS4 and PS5
  • Nintendo Switch, both Switch 1 and Switch 2

Multiple sessions at the same time

What it is: you can now create and manage several named sessions concurrently instead of one at a time.

Why it matters: almost every modern multiplayer game keeps players in a persistent group that survives individual matches: a party, a squad, a clubhouse. Previously, joining a match meant tearing down the session those players were already sharing, then rebuilding it afterwards. Now the social session and the gameplay session simply coexist.

Your game still has one active gameplay connection. What changed is that the lobby holding your friends together no longer has to be a casualty of starting a match.

Voice and networking that follow the session

What it is: each named session can own its own PlayFab Party network, the layer that carries low-latency game data and voice chat. One session at a time is the voice-enabled one, and you choose which.

Why it matters: this is what makes multiple sessions genuinely useful rather than just technically possible. Your players can stay in party chat while a match spins up around them, and you decide whether they hear their squad or the whole match lobby.

Dedicated servers can create and own lobbies

What it is: a dedicated server can now create and own a PlayFab lobby and run Party networking using a PlayFab server identity, with no signed-in console or PC player account on the machine.

Why it matters: headless servers don't have a person sitting at them, so anything that assumed a signed-in platform user was a genuine blocker for authoritative server-run matches. If you run competitive or anti-cheat-sensitive modes where the server, not a player's console, must be in charge, this is the change that unblocks you.

Lobby discovery you can actually filter

What it is: you choose which of your Unreal session settings are searchable through PlayFab Lobby: game mode, playlist, skill tier, map, or whatever your title cares about.

Why it matters: the filtering happens on the service, not on the player's machine. Instead of pulling down a large list of lobbies and sorting through it client-side, you ask for exactly the lobbies that match and get those back.

The result is faster browse screens, less bandwidth, and a server browser that stays usable as your player count grows.

Unreal Engine 5.8 and a faster day-to-day workflow

3.1.3 builds and ships against Unreal Engine 5.8, which uses GDK 2604 Update 2 by default. If you were holding an engine upgrade because the plugin lagged behind, that gap is closed.

Alongside it, three GDK workflow improvements:

  • Friend lobby search now works on GDK. FindFriendSession returns the lobbies your Xbox friends are currently in, so an in-game "join a friend's game" list finally has something to show. This previously failed outright.
  • Modern game invites. Invites sent and accepted from the console shell activate your title correctly.
  • Single-instance Play-in-Editor. On Unreal 5.8 with GDK as the native OSS, you can exercise supported flows straight from the editor instead of packaging a build for every iteration. That is minutes back on every single test loop.

Fixes and reliability

  • No more authentication retry storms. A failing sign-in used to be able to hammer the service with rapid retries. Retries are now bounded and back off, which protects both your title and your players' connections.
  • More reliable lobby creation during matchmaking, including when several session operations are in flight at once, exactly the moment things used to get fragile.
  • Game Save is materially better. Results, callbacks, threading, rollback, and cloud-state handling were all fixed and expanded, so saves behave predictably when the network doesn't.
  • Broad stability work across sessions, Party, voice, and the editor lifecycle, plus non-unity and non-PCH builds, which keeps large codebases compiling cleanly.

Before you upgrade

3.1.3 has breaking changes. They are small and mostly mechanical, but they will not compile away silently.

Check platform availability. The 3.1.3 release on GitHub is validated for XBOX on PC, Steam, and Xbox Series X|S. For other NDA'd platforms, reach out to PlayFab support to understand how to access these components and confirm version compatibility.

  • Voice is now explicit. Request it with bUseLobbiesVoiceChatIfAvailable, and remember only one session can hold voice at a time.
  • Game Save UI callbacks changed shape. They now hand you a structured result enum and an error message instead of a bare success flag. More to read, but far easier to diagnose.
  • GetLoginStatus now means PlayFab. It reports your PlayFab authentication state rather than the native platform's login state. If you branch on it, re-read those branches.
  • Don't cache entity handles. Fetch them when you need them, because a cached handle goes stale across re-authentication.
  • Party calls go through the session. Direct Party-network call sites should use the session's FPlayFabPartyNetwork object, the natural consequence of each session owning its own network.

The road from 3.1.0 to 3.1.3

About three months of releases: platform reach first, then the session architecture that 3.1.3 builds on.

  • 3.1.0, May 13. PlayStation arrives, sessions get rebuilt. PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 support via the Unified SDK, GDK 2604, and a significant multi-session architecture refactor, the groundwork everything since has been built on. Both plugins moved to a single shared version number.
  • 3.1.2, July 2. Nintendo Switch, both generations. Switch 1 and Switch 2 support landed together, completing the platform set. Also improved the login flow on PS4 and PS5 and fixed non-unity and non-PCH builds across every supported platform.
  • 3.1.3, August 20. The session model opens up. Unreal Engine 5.8, multiple simultaneous named sessions, per-session Party networks with selectable voice, dedicated-server lobby ownership, filtered lobby discovery, GDK friend lobby search and invites, and single-instance Play-in-Editor.

Shipping an Unreal title with multiplayer? The pattern players expect now is simple: they group up with friends once, and stay together while matches start and end around them. With 3.1.3 that pattern is something you configure rather than something you engineer around, on every platform PlayFab for Unreal Engine supports.

If you hit something or want a capability that isn't there yet, open an issue on the repo. Partner feedback is what moved multiple sessions and dedicated-server support up the list.

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