Backend and Live Services Glossary · Gaming

Account deletion requirement: Apple's and Google's rule that an app that creates accounts lets the player start deletion of the whole account inside the app (and, on Google Play, from the web), not just deactivate it (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Account merge: folding two accounts into one; the player chooses which profile survives per game, ownership is unioned by revoking and regranting entitlements and moving balances as merge ledger transactions (never by editing rows), penalties carry over, and every service applies its step idempotently within a reversal window (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Account status: active, locked (takeover suspected or recovery in progress) or closed (including an account retired by a merge, which names the survivor); a ban is a penalty, never a status (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Anonymous first, recoverable later: a device or custom ID login that asks nothing but can't be recovered if the device is lost, and the email or platform login a player is prompted to add at the first purchase or real progress (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Clawback: the one algorithm for refunds, voids and chargebacks: find the grant by its store transaction, reverse it, apply a published rule for currency already spent, and record the decision, never locking the account (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Cloud save: a save file copied to a platform's cloud or the game's own storage so it follows the player across devices; platform clouds sync bytes and leave deciding which bytes are right to the game (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Config version: an immutable published snapshot of a game's remote config; a change or a rollback publishes a new version, and clients and telemetry report the version they run (Live Operations).
Cross Save: Bungie's Destiny 2 model of cross-progression, where the player picks one active account whose characters are reachable everywhere while some purchases stay on their platform (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Cross-play, cross-progression, cross-purchase: players on different platforms in one match, the same profile and rank everywhere, and something bought on one platform usable on another, which store agreements constrain more than technology (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Data request: a player's access, export or erasure request, tracked per account with one step for each service that holds their data (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
End of service: the planned shutdown of a live game's servers, run as a dated plan: notice, a stop on paid sales, refunds, a data export window and an ordered turn-off (Live Operations).
Entitlement: a never-deleted record that an account has the right to an item, with its source, a unique source_ref, validity and revocation; the source of truth every other view of ownership defers to (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Environment (versioned): one immutably versioned specification of the client build, server build, service images and config overrides deployed and rolled back together as a set per shard (Game Backend Architecture; the release-side record, a release set, is in Live Operations).
Epic Online Services (EOS): Epic's free cross-platform services, split into Game Services that sign in with any identity provider and Epic Account Services (friends, presence, overlay) that need an Epic account (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Event envelope: the fields every telemetry event carries whatever its type, so any event can be joined to its account, match, build and config (Telemetry & Analytics).
Experiment, variant, exposure: a test of remote config against a control group, the config overlay each assigned group receives, and the first moment a player actually reached the change, from which results are read (Game Metrics; delivery in Live Operations).
Game result (exactly once): the result a game server reports at match end, ingested once per match from the assigned server only; a second submission is a duplicate or a conflict, never applied twice (Game Backend Architecture).
Global and regional services: accounts, entitlements, wallets and catalog with one logical home, against parties, matchmaking, match history and game servers that live per shard and fail alone (Game Backend Architecture).
Heatmap: a count of events per cell of a map, from server-sampled positions keyed by map version and normalized by time spent in each cell (Telemetry & Analytics).
Hot path, cold path: the stream that feeds live operations within minutes (concurrency, crash spikes, frame-time alarms) and the scheduled warehouse build of everything else, both from one event stream (Telemetry & Analytics).
Hotfix: a smaller client or server build shipped between patches; a server-only hotfix needs no download (Live Operations).
Inventory: what a player can use in one game, the account's live entitlements plus the profile's live item instances, read from a cache and written in transactions that check ownership, quantity and capacity (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Item definition, item instance: the catalog entry for what an item is (items), and one copy held by a player profile with its own state, such as rolled stats or a trade history; items are rights, stackable counts or unique copies (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Kill switch: a flag that disables content or a system without a build (a character, a mode, a store item, a crafting recipe), failing safe for players already using it (Live Operations).
Linking, relink cooldown: attaching a platform identity to an account after proving both sides with fresh credentials, refusing silent moves, and waiting out a cooldown before an unlinked identity can join a different account (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Live operations: the discipline of changing a running game safely and on schedule: patches, hotfixes, server-side data, config, events, experiments and incidents (Live Operations).
Login queue: admission control with a user interface at the edge of the account service: a capacity per scope, a ceiling on the queue, honest positions, priority classes and reclaimed idle slots (Game Backend Architecture).
Micropatch, server-side override: a server-only fix shipped as data the game server loads, replacing the original by key; TFT's fixed a broken burn effect in about an hour, and it must be merged back before the next patch (Live Operations).
Paid currency, earned currency: units bought with real money and units granted by play, kept in separate ledger accounts even when the client shows one balance, because refunds, accounting and consumer law treat them differently (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Patch cadence (train): a fixed release schedule kept as data that tools read; League's 2026 schedule has 24 patches, mostly two weeks apart, and out-of-band fixes ride faster paths between trains (Live Operations).
Platform identity: an account another company issued (a Steam ID, a PSN account, an Xbox user, an Epic, Apple, Google or Nintendo sign-in), verified server to server and linked to your account by its stable ID, never a name (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Platform scope: where an entitlement may be used: portable across platforms, only on the platform where it was bought, or bounded in time (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Pseudonymization (erasure): replacing an erased player's identity with an opaque ID in shared records such as matches and ledgers, so other players' history and the books stay intact (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Purchase lot: one purchase of paid currency tracked as its own balance, so each paid spend is attributed to a lot (first in, first out) and the unspent part of any purchase is a query (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Release set: one record per patch, hotfix or override naming the client builds, server build, service versions, config version and content version released together; not Patching's per-build release manifest (Live Operations).
Remote config: tuning a game without a deploy through versioned key-value parameters, schema-checked, audited, defaulted in the client and applied to game servers at match start (Live Operations).
Sample by match: keeping a deterministic fraction of matches (by hashing the match ID) in full rather than sampling events, so a kept match's paths and per-match questions stay answerable (Telemetry & Analytics).
Save conflict: two histories of one save produced by devices that played while disconnected; platforms ask the player, hand both versions to the game, or pick by a game metric (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Save format version: a version in a save's header, separate from the build version, that the loader reads first and migrates forward one step at a time; a build never writes an older format (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Seasons and events (dated content): passes, limited-time modes and store rotations shipped dark and activated by a valid_during range, with a start rule (one global instant or local midnight) and a minimum client build (Live Operations).
Server-authoritative progression: progress held by the backend, with the client showing it and asking to change it; anything paid for, tradeable, shown to others or deciding a match belongs here (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Server-recorded fact: a match result, purchase, grant or penalty written by the server or backend; client events are claims, used for behavior and diagnostics only (Telemetry & Analytics).
Shard, platform: one regional deployment of the platform with its game servers, the platform being the backend services around the game server (parties, matchmaking, provisioning, results, store) (Game Backend Architecture).
Skin gambling: third-party sites taking tradable items as stakes, using the platform's sign-in and trading APIs; Valve moved against such sites in 2016 and the UK Gambling Commission prosecuted FUTGalaxy's operators in 2017 (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Sources and sinks: the faucets that create currency and items (rewards, drops, purchases, compensation) and the drains that remove them (store spends, crafting, repair, fees), measured exactly from the ledger (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Spend order: the versioned rule for whether a spend uses paid or earned units first when a player holds both, recorded on each spend because finance, refunds and regulators ask; paid spends are also attributed to purchases first in, first out, so each purchase's unspent remainder is a query (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Stable ID (PUUID, Riot ID): the platform's or publisher's permanent player identifier that records key on, against a display name such as a Riot ID (a game name and tag line) that can change (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Steam Auto-Cloud: Steam Cloud's mode that syncs a game's save files on launch and exit without code in the game, showing a conflict window when it can't decide (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Trade hold, escrow: the wait before a new copy can be traded (Valve recommends at least 72 hours after purchase), and locking items in an open trade so they can't be spent or traded twice (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Trade protection, trade reversal: Counter-Strike 2's July 2025 rule that items received in a trade are protected for a period and trades from the last 7 days can be reversed, which needs each copy's chain of owners (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Version skew: client builds, server builds, services, config and content at different versions at once; managed with exact client-server matches, N and N-1 service support, expand and contract migrations and a minimum client version (Live Operations).
Voided match, abandoned match: a match undone after the fact (a confirmed cheater, a server fault), marked voided with a reason so consumers reverse their effects, and a match whose server died without reporting, closed by a timeout job (Game Backend Architecture).
Wallet, currency ledger: an account's balance of one virtual currency, kept as a double-entry ledger whose transactions sum to zero across player, issued and consumed accounts, so the balance is the sum of its entries (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).

Account deletion requirement: Apple's and Google's rule that an app that creates accounts lets the player start deletion of the whole account inside the app (and, on Google Play, from the web), not just deactivate it (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Account merge: folding two accounts into one; the player chooses which profile survives per game, ownership is unioned by revoking and regranting entitlements and moving balances as merge ledger transactions (never by editing rows), penalties carry over, and every service applies its step idempotently within a reversal window (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Account status: active, locked (takeover suspected or recovery in progress) or closed (including an account retired by a merge, which names the survivor); a ban is a penalty, never a status (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Anonymous first, recoverable later: a device or custom ID login that asks nothing but can't be recovered if the device is lost, and the email or platform login a player is prompted to add at the first purchase or real progress (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Clawback: the one algorithm for refunds, voids and chargebacks: find the grant by its store transaction, reverse it, apply a published rule for currency already spent, and record the decision, never locking the account (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Cloud save: a save file copied to a platform's cloud or the game's own storage so it follows the player across devices; platform clouds sync bytes and leave deciding which bytes are right to the game (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Config version: an immutable published snapshot of a game's remote config; a change or a rollback publishes a new version, and clients and telemetry report the version they run (Live Operations).
Cross Save: Bungie's Destiny 2 model of cross-progression, where the player picks one active account whose characters are reachable everywhere while some purchases stay on their platform (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Cross-play, cross-progression, cross-purchase: players on different platforms in one match, the same profile and rank everywhere, and something bought on one platform usable on another, which store agreements constrain more than technology (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Data request: a player's access, export or erasure request, tracked per account with one step for each service that holds their data (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
End of service: the planned shutdown of a live game's servers, run as a dated plan: notice, a stop on paid sales, refunds, a data export window and an ordered turn-off (Live Operations).
Entitlement: a never-deleted record that an account has the right to an item, with its source, a unique source_ref, validity and revocation; the source of truth every other view of ownership defers to (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Environment (versioned): one immutably versioned specification of the client build, server build, service images and config overrides deployed and rolled back together as a set per shard (Game Backend Architecture; the release-side record, a release set, is in Live Operations).
Epic Online Services (EOS): Epic's free cross-platform services, split into Game Services that sign in with any identity provider and Epic Account Services (friends, presence, overlay) that need an Epic account (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Event envelope: the fields every telemetry event carries whatever its type, so any event can be joined to its account, match, build and config (Telemetry & Analytics).
Experiment, variant, exposure: a test of remote config against a control group, the config overlay each assigned group receives, and the first moment a player actually reached the change, from which results are read (Game Metrics; delivery in Live Operations).
Game result (exactly once): the result a game server reports at match end, ingested once per match from the assigned server only; a second submission is a duplicate or a conflict, never applied twice (Game Backend Architecture).
Global and regional services: accounts, entitlements, wallets and catalog with one logical home, against parties, matchmaking, match history and game servers that live per shard and fail alone (Game Backend Architecture).
Heatmap: a count of events per cell of a map, from server-sampled positions keyed by map version and normalized by time spent in each cell (Telemetry & Analytics).
Hot path, cold path: the stream that feeds live operations within minutes (concurrency, crash spikes, frame-time alarms) and the scheduled warehouse build of everything else, both from one event stream (Telemetry & Analytics).
Hotfix: a smaller client or server build shipped between patches; a server-only hotfix needs no download (Live Operations).
Inventory: what a player can use in one game, the account's live entitlements plus the profile's live item instances, read from a cache and written in transactions that check ownership, quantity and capacity (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Item definition, item instance: the catalog entry for what an item is (items), and one copy held by a player profile with its own state, such as rolled stats or a trade history; items are rights, stackable counts or unique copies (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Kill switch: a flag that disables content or a system without a build (a character, a mode, a store item, a crafting recipe), failing safe for players already using it (Live Operations).
Linking, relink cooldown: attaching a platform identity to an account after proving both sides with fresh credentials, refusing silent moves, and waiting out a cooldown before an unlinked identity can join a different account (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Live operations: the discipline of changing a running game safely and on schedule: patches, hotfixes, server-side data, config, events, experiments and incidents (Live Operations).
Login queue: admission control with a user interface at the edge of the account service: a capacity per scope, a ceiling on the queue, honest positions, priority classes and reclaimed idle slots (Game Backend Architecture).
Micropatch, server-side override: a server-only fix shipped as data the game server loads, replacing the original by key; TFT's fixed a broken burn effect in about an hour, and it must be merged back before the next patch (Live Operations).
Paid currency, earned currency: units bought with real money and units granted by play, kept in separate ledger accounts even when the client shows one balance, because refunds, accounting and consumer law treat them differently (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Patch cadence (train): a fixed release schedule kept as data that tools read; League's 2026 schedule has 24 patches, mostly two weeks apart, and out-of-band fixes ride faster paths between trains (Live Operations).
Platform identity: an account another company issued (a Steam ID, a PSN account, an Xbox user, an Epic, Apple, Google or Nintendo sign-in), verified server to server and linked to your account by its stable ID, never a name (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Platform scope: where an entitlement may be used: portable across platforms, only on the platform where it was bought, or bounded in time (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Pseudonymization (erasure): replacing an erased player's identity with an opaque ID in shared records such as matches and ledgers, so other players' history and the books stay intact (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Purchase lot: one purchase of paid currency tracked as its own balance, so each paid spend is attributed to a lot (first in, first out) and the unspent part of any purchase is a query (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Release set: one record per patch, hotfix or override naming the client builds, server build, service versions, config version and content version released together; not Patching's per-build release manifest (Live Operations).
Remote config: tuning a game without a deploy through versioned key-value parameters, schema-checked, audited, defaulted in the client and applied to game servers at match start (Live Operations).
Sample by match: keeping a deterministic fraction of matches (by hashing the match ID) in full rather than sampling events, so a kept match's paths and per-match questions stay answerable (Telemetry & Analytics).
Save conflict: two histories of one save produced by devices that played while disconnected; platforms ask the player, hand both versions to the game, or pick by a game metric (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Save format version: a version in a save's header, separate from the build version, that the loader reads first and migrates forward one step at a time; a build never writes an older format (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Seasons and events (dated content): passes, limited-time modes and store rotations shipped dark and activated by a valid_during range, with a start rule (one global instant or local midnight) and a minimum client build (Live Operations).
Server-authoritative progression: progress held by the backend, with the client showing it and asking to change it; anything paid for, tradeable, shown to others or deciding a match belongs here (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Server-recorded fact: a match result, purchase, grant or penalty written by the server or backend; client events are claims, used for behavior and diagnostics only (Telemetry & Analytics).
Shard, platform: one regional deployment of the platform with its game servers, the platform being the backend services around the game server (parties, matchmaking, provisioning, results, store) (Game Backend Architecture).
Skin gambling: third-party sites taking tradable items as stakes, using the platform's sign-in and trading APIs; Valve moved against such sites in 2016 and the UK Gambling Commission prosecuted FUTGalaxy's operators in 2017 (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Sources and sinks: the faucets that create currency and items (rewards, drops, purchases, compensation) and the drains that remove them (store spends, crafting, repair, fees), measured exactly from the ledger (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Spend order: the versioned rule for whether a spend uses paid or earned units first when a player holds both, recorded on each spend because finance, refunds and regulators ask; paid spends are also attributed to purchases first in, first out, so each purchase's unspent remainder is a query (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Stable ID (PUUID, Riot ID): the platform's or publisher's permanent player identifier that records key on, against a display name such as a Riot ID (a game name and tag line) that can change (Accounts, Identity & Cross-Platform).
Steam Auto-Cloud: Steam Cloud's mode that syncs a game's save files on launch and exit without code in the game, showing a conflict window when it can't decide (Saves, Progression & Player Data).
Trade hold, escrow: the wait before a new copy can be traded (Valve recommends at least 72 hours after purchase), and locking items in an open trade so they can't be spent or traded twice (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Trade protection, trade reversal: Counter-Strike 2's July 2025 rule that items received in a trade are protected for a period and trades from the last 7 days can be reversed, which needs each copy's chain of owners (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).
Version skew: client builds, server builds, services, config and content at different versions at once; managed with exact client-server matches, N and N-1 service support, expand and contract migrations and a minimum client version (Live Operations).
Voided match, abandoned match: a match undone after the fact (a confirmed cheater, a server fault), marked voided with a reason so consumers reverse their effects, and a match whose server died without reporting, closed by a timeout job (Game Backend Architecture).
Wallet, currency ledger: an account's balance of one virtual currency, kept as a double-entry ledger whose transactions sum to zero across player, issued and consumed accounts, so the balance is the sum of its entries (Inventories, Entitlements & Economies).