Hi,

I was researching about a game called "Hytale", so I found some hosting websites that offer "Hytale Server Hosting" before the game was even released. That's because the company responsible for the game, Hypixel Studios, contacted them.

I noticed that letting third party companies host servers is even better than the company responsible for the game paying for all servers, just look at Minecraft for example.

But, how do I do it?
I don't know any terms for that, so I couldn't research it properly, I just found a post on the Hytale blog talking about server technology, and ironically a Minecraft page where you can download a .jar file named “server.jar” so you can set up a Minecraft server. But it didn't help, it didn't answer my questions and I just got more confused about how this works.

Can someone with more accurate knowledge help me understand how this is possible/how it works?

I do not know much about networking and multiplayer, but I think letting my game (it's more a project than a game) be hosted by a third party would be a great benefit in the future, I just don't know how to do it or how it works.

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Mentioned search results:
https://hytale.com/news/2019/1/an-overview-of-hytales-server-technology
https://www.minecraft.net/pt-pt/download/server (does not contain automatic download)

Thanks for any help.

At a very high level, a game server is just a binary application that accepts network connections from the game client. If you are self-hosting, you rent servers and deploy the binary there. If you want 3rd parties to host, you provide them with the binary, and they deploy it on their own servers. Many games offer their dedicated server binary to anyone who buys the game, so that players can decide to host their own servers (although this was considerably more common in the past).

Of course, there are complexities to having other folks operate the servers. You'll need to build in network configuration, and provide setup documentation, as well as make sure you are testing with many different combinations of network and firewalls. And you'll likely need to provide management tools as well - admin options to ban unruly players, and so forth.

Finally, thank you so much @swiftcoder
I wonder why sometimes it's so difficult to find such a simple answer (or maybe it is quite complex and you just explained it in a simple way).

Anyway, It's a well-explained answer, even I who don't know much about networking and multiplayer finally understood how it works, once again, thank you very much.

And, by the way, I finally managed to do more research on it properly.