Hathora is gone. You can come over.
David runs VP Engineering at a competitive shooter on 200K MAU. Hathora gave notice; the rewrite budget is zero. Here's how his team cut over in a sprint.
200K MAU competitive shooter migrating off Hathora with zero rewrite budget, moving to Sync + Edge in a sprint.
The audit call
David books a 30-minute architecture call. His studio's authoritative game server already runs on Docker; matchmaking is a thin Hathora wrapper. PlayServ's engineer walks through the mapping: Hathora rooms become Sync sessions, region selection becomes Edge routing, everything else is policy.
By lunch, David has a one-page migration plan in his inbox — three files to change, the hot loop untouched.
SDK swap
The client team replaces the Hathora SDK with @playserv/sync. The connect / join-session / send-message surface is intentionally close — mostly a find-and-replace plus a rename on the session ID field. Integration tests run green by end of day.
Server logic ported
David's team has a choice: keep the existing game server as a bring-your-own container and point Edge at it, or rewrite the hot loop with [Sync] attributes. They choose option A for this week and schedule the rewrite for next sprint. Shadow traffic tests show p95 latency at 58 ms — a hair better than Hathora.
Shadow cohort at 5%
Pulse flips a realtime-config flag: 5% of matchmaking traffic routes to PlayServ Edge. The ops dashboard tracks disconnect rate, reconnection latency, and per-region fill. Everything lines up with the Hathora baseline.
David extends the flag window overnight to catch the late-session crowd.
Cut over
Flag at 100%. Hathora's fallback gets disabled in the matchmaker. David sends the cancellation email to Hathora before standup. The team ships a hotfix for an unrelated bug on the same deploy — because it's just a deploy now, not a migration.
“We had three weeks. We finished in four working days, and matchmaking, anti-cheat, and remote config came along for the ride.”
Hathora's room model maps cleanly onto Sync sessions. The client SDK is a drop-in; your existing authoritative server keeps running. The only Hathora feature without a direct analogue is per-room hourly billing — PlayServ bills by peak CCU, which is cheaper for most competitive titles.
Hathora notice on your wall?
We have a dedicated migration team and a one-page plan within 24 hours of the call.