Heroic Labs

Heroic Labs is a London-based game infrastructure company best known for Nakama, its open-source distributed game server designed for building real-time multiplayer games, social features, and live-service game operations. Nakama provides a comprehensive set of backend primitives including real-time matchmaking and multiplayer, persistent social graphs and friend systems, in-game chat and notifications, player accounts and sessions, leaderboards, and a built-in scripting runtime for custom game logic written in Lua, TypeScript, or Go. The open-source core can be self-hosted on any cloud provider, giving studios complete control over their infrastructure and data, while Heroic Labs offers Heroic Cloud as a fully managed hosted deployment for teams that prefer not to operate their own servers. Nakama's client SDKs cover Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, JavaScript, and multiple mobile platforms. The open-source model has driven a large community of adopters across indie, mid-market, and enterprise game studios. Heroic Labs was founded in 2015 and is backed by investors including Horizons Ventures. It competes with PlayFab, GameSparks, and LootLocker in the game backend market, differentiating through open-source transparency and self-hosting flexibility.