Every competitive game
has to solve matchmaking.
Even the best teams struggle.
Skill ratings fight your matchmaker
Elo, TrueSkill, and their variants are mathematically unstable under skill-based matchmaking. The tighter your matchmaker, the less reliable your ratings become. You end up fighting your own foundation.
Building it will cost you years
Adopt a general-purpose matchmaker and you design around its trade-offs for the life of your game. Build your own and you'll lose months before the first real match. Either way, the tuning will never end.
Your matchmaker says no a lot
Matchmaking quietly limits what your designers can ship. Show players their rating? Launch a new asymmetric mode? Often difficult and months of work. The systems should serve your design, not limit it.
Matchmaking systems are some of the most complex design engineering tasks you're ever going to tackle, and they're thankless.
Jeff Kaplan · ex-BlizzardOne system for skill,
matchmaking, and control.
IVK Skill
A player-facing skill rating system built for modern multiplayer. Accurate, configurable, and stable. Access it via API or license.
IVK Match
A complete matchmaking engine for multiplayer games. Built-in matchmaking logic, simple rulesets, and full observability.
Dev Portal
The operational layer for skill and matchmaking. Configure how your systems behave and watch every decision in real time.
Work with the team behind THE matchmaking platform.
Bring us a matchmaking problem. We'll scope, quote, and build. On our platform, alongside it, or on systems that are entirely your own.
Professional ServicesCo-development
Our engineers in your standups and your repo.
Skill model tuning
Calibrated on your own match history.
Matchmaking audit
Where match quality breaks, and a ranked list of fixes.
Queue and ruleset design
Team sizes, parties, tolerance windows, backfill.
Matchmaker migration
Off a custom-built or vendor system, players intact.
Inside matchmaking.
How to fix Call of Duty's matchmaking
Matchmaking is a constant source of negative player sentiment for Call of Duty. There are ways to fix it.
"I Can’t Play with my Friends"
Why SBMM makes it so friends of different skill levels can't play together — and the policy levers that fix it.
What's wrong with being normal?
Normality is a red flag when it comes to matchmaking ratings. Lognormal beats Gaussian in production.
