IVK Match

Better matches,
on less compute,
with full visibility.

IVK Match is a complete matchmaking system. Your backend submits players, it forms the matches and hands them back. At its core is Nemesis, our decision engine.

Talk to us Read the docs

Intra-Match Stddev (avg)

0.11

Team MMR Diff (avg) p95

0.16

Intra-Match Stddev Distribution

0.05

0.04

0.03

0.02

0.01

20:25

20:26

20:27

the engine

Introducing Nemesis:
the engine at its core.

IVK Match runs the matchmaking. Nemesis is the algorithm that decides the matches, and it's some of our best work.

THE PROBLEM

Quality degrades as you wait.

Most matchmakers relax their rules the longer a player sits in queue. Relaxing constraints means the match at 45 seconds is measurably worse than the match at 5 seconds.

HOW WE FIX IT

It pools instead of relaxing.

Nemesis holds a live pool of players and continuously finds the best match within it, improving every group tick by tick. The longer a player waits, the better match they will get.

WHAT IT MEANS

Three main inputs

Set a target pool size, a max wait, and your worst-acceptable match. Nemesis handles the rest. No expansion rules to write, no per-queue tuning, and no endless maintenance.

Fits the stack you already have.

Let us manage it and we handle scaling, uptime, and operations. Self-host and you get a lightweight Rust service that holds very high concurrency on modest hardware, self-heals, stays up, and runs locally for development in minutes.

Ratings, built in
IVK Match pairs natively with IVK Skill, ratings made for competitive play, and still takes whatever MMR you already use if you'd rather keep your own.
Keep your stack
Keep your orchestrators and backend providers. Your systems stay in control of identity, auth, and sessions while IVK Match connects to what you already run and just returns the match.
Your engine, or ours
Most studios run Nemesis and stay. Want to use your own decision engine? Bring it. Not sure what you need? We'll help you design one that fits your game.

built to stay up

Robust by design.

Keep matching through failures, bursts, and bad config. Matchmaking can't go down mid-session. Run multiple instances and Nemesis keeps players matching through node failures, traffic spikes, and configuration mistakes with no manual intervention required.

queue depth

388

p50 to match

20.3s

avg balance

0.93

queue depth · last 60s

see everything

Watch every decision, as it happens.

IVK Match ships with built-in Grafana dashboards showing live queues, matches forming, and per-match quality. Or use our OpenTelemetry on the stack you already run.

Dashboards in the box
Prebuilt Grafana dashboards ship with the matchmaker: live queues, matches forming, per-match balance, time to match, and much more.
Or bring your own stack
Rather use your own tooling? It all exports over OpenTelemetry, so the metrics, traces, and logs land in the stack you already run.
Test before players feel it
Shadow a new matchmaking config against live traffic, then compare the results in our tools before anything reaches a real player.

features

Built for real matchmaking,
not just ticket routing.

Matchmaking is only as good as the ratings under it. IVK Match pairs natively with IVK Skill, built for competitive play, and still takes whatever MMR you already use.

Built-in matchmaking logic

Nemesis ships ready to run, alongside simpler algorithms for warm-body and skill-based grouping. Prefer your own? Bring it, or we help you build one.

Balanced as it's built

Team balance is part of how a match is formed, not a separate process after. And we match the shape of each team, not just the average, so it's never a superstar and four beginners against five solid players.

Party-aware

A coordinated five-stack should face a team that resembles it, not five strangers to run over. IVK Match rates a party’s coordination advantage and any high-skill carry, then finds opponents on the same level.

Latency and connection aware

Every match respects a latency budget, tunable per region. Choose to minimize everyone's ping or to level the ping gap so nobody has a connection advantage.

Crossplay

Platform mixing is mutual opt-in: a PC and console player only meet if both sides allow it. Segment by playlist, input device, or language the same way.

Any match shape

Fixed 5v5, free-for-all, flexible 4v4 to 6v6, or asymmetric formats like 3v3v3v3 and 5v2. Team sizes and counts are yours to define.

Every mode from one queue

Run multiple playlists and brackets side by side in a single queue, with fairness arbitration deciding contested players so your headline mode always gets served first.

Smart host selection

Nemesis returns the best host for each match plus every acceptable alternative, using your own region identifiers, so placement and failover pass straight through to your orchestrator.

Change anything, live

Tune constraints, weights, and rules and they apply within seconds, no redeploy. A bad edit is rejected on validation, so a typo can't take matchmaking down.

Backfill

Decide how live matches recover when players leave: add a bot, pull in a new player, or let someone rejoin.

Q3 2026

Scales with your population

The same configuration holds from 50 concurrent players to 5,000-plus. Nemesis paces itself against the pool, matching conservatively when it is thin and fast when it is healthy.

Ready to solve
your matchmaking?

Talk to engineers who've shipped matchmaking at scale.

Let's talk Read the docs

Better matches,on less compute,with full visibility.

Introducing Nemesis:the engine at its core.