A game needs more than good gameplay. Players want to find their progress on every device, compete with friends and trust that the leaderboard is honest. Building all of that yourself can easily cost a small team months. This is where horizOn, our backend for games, comes in. October 2026 was its busiest month so far. Here is the recap in plain words, grouped by topic instead of version numbers.
Fair leaderboards: the server decides
A leaderboard is only as honest as the device that sends the score. Anyone who has released an online game knows the problem. After a few days impossible scores sit at the top, and real players lose interest.
Since October 1, Validated Actions address exactly this. Every run gets a single-use ticket from the server. At the end, the server checks the result against rules you define yourself. The player's state lives on the server, and daily caps stop anyone from simply farming points or rewards.
If a run looks suspicious, the game can upload evidence. In the dashboard you see these cases in a list, can review and archive runs and moderate your leaderboard. Since October 11, a simplified rule form with ready-made templates makes getting started easier.
The leaderboards themselves also became more flexible:
- Slots per account: every account has a fixed number of slots for scores.
- Eviction: you decide what happens when those slots are full.
- Profiles in the list: entries now show the player's profile.
Player profiles and saves across devices
With Player Profiles, players can show who they are. There are avatars, frames and badges plus a system to unlock cosmetic content. Gift codes can grant these unlocks. That makes events, community rewards or small launch gifts much easier to run.
Cloud saves got an important improvement on October 10 and 11. Every save now carries a revision, so the server always knows which version is current. Players who switch between phone and PC no longer overwrite newer progress with an old save by accident. The feature is part of the SDKs for Unity, Godot and Unreal.
Eleven new building blocks for your game
On October 22 and 23 came the biggest update so far. The server, the dashboard and all three engine SDKs gained eleven new features at once:
- Items and inventory: item catalogs and every player's inventory
- Player Values: currencies and values like energy, managed by the server and not the device
- Achievements: achievements with rewards that reliably reach the player
- Player statistics: counters and personal bests
- Friends: friend lists and a way to look up other players
- Groups: groups with roles and their own administration
- Chat: messages between players, with older history kept on the device
- Matches: turn-based matches where players take turns one after another
- Shared Objects: game data that several players work on together
- Marketplace: item trading between players, with protected returns
- Player Inbox: personal messages and broadcasts with rewards
Why "atomic" matters so much here
Imagine a player buys a sword in the shop for 500 coins. At that very moment the connection drops. In the worst case the coins are gone and the sword is missing. Or the player gets the sword twice because the game sends the purchase again.
horizOn therefore treats such operations as one unit. A purchase or a reward claim either completes fully or not at all. The SDKs also remember what a player was about to do and finish it cleanly after a crash. For you, that means fewer support requests about vanished items.
Chat and matches, used wisely
Chat and matches run over a WebSocket connection. Matches are deliberately turn-based and asynchronous, built for games where players move one after another, even with breaks in between. Typical examples are board games, strategy games or card games. For chat, the dashboard has a moderation view, so you stay in control of what is said in your game.
Since this update, gift codes can also grant Player Values directly, for example 100 coins for everyone who joined a community event. Every building block has its own dashboard view and a guide on the website with examples for each engine.
Self-hosting and moving over
horizOn comes with the free, open source horizOn Simple Server. It only needs PHP 7.4 or newer and a database, so it also runs on ordinary shared hosting, and suits teams that want to run their data themselves.
In October the Simple Server caught up a lot. Version 1.4 on October 11 brought player profiles. Version 1.5 on October 23 added almost all of the new building blocks, with SQLite and MySQL. Chat stays exclusive to the cloud.
Since October 25 there is also a migration path. You download a project's content as a file in the dashboard, and Simple Server 1.6 imports that file. If you start in the cloud today and want to host it yourself later, you are not locked in.
More clarity on plans, signup and availability
A lot also changed around your account:
- New Plus plan: since October 11 it sits between Basic and Pro, for projects that have outgrown Basic.
- Email on the Free plan: since October 13, free projects can send transactional emails too, within tight limits.
- Transparent pricing: the pricing page explains what happens at every limit. A full comparison of all plans is checked directly against the real limits in the backend.
- Safer signup: since October 14, Cloudflare Turnstile protects registration against bots. Most humans no longer have to solve anything.
- No more Meta tracking: the Meta pixel and the Conversions API were removed on October 13.
- Public status page: at horizon.pm/status you can see the last 90 days of availability per region and the mean response time.
Guest sign-ins now have a default limit of 120 per IP address and project. The limits for anonymous sign-ins are also configurable.
Faster and more stable at the end of the month
After the big update, the last week of October was all about performance. Several server releases between October 26 and 30 reduce the computing time per request in the database and the backend. The server also recovers cleanly when the database switches to another node. That leaves headroom for the days when your game gets especially busy.
Since version 1.10.2, the Unreal SDK loads in Unreal Engine 5.6 and newer without an incompatibility warning. The import configuration is now saved in DefaultGame.ini. Version 1.10.5 on October 31 also fixes build issues on Windows.
Documentation and AI assistants
The quickstart page was rebuilt in early October. It is now documentation, course and cheat sheet in one, with setup steps for every engine and embedded videos. The code examples on the feature pages come straight from the real Unity SDK and the app API.
If you code with AI assistants, the horizOn MCP Server helps. In October it gained tools for Validated Actions, profiles and revision-checked saves. Version 1.9 added all of the new building blocks, from inventory to matches to chat moderation. Your coding assistant can call horizOn features directly instead of guessing the API.
What does this mean for your project?
If you are planning a game with online features, these questions are worth a look:
- What must the server decide? Anything involving currency, rewards or leaderboards belongs on the server, not on the device.
- What happens when the connection drops? Deliberately test the case where the connection breaks in the middle of a purchase.
- Where should the data live in the long run? A migration path from the cloud to your own server removes the worry of committing too early.
- Who moderates? Chat and leaderboards need someone keeping an eye on them. Plan time for that from the start.
For an overview of all our products, see the October project update. If you want to build your own game or a gamified app, we are happy to support you with game development.
All changes in detail are in the horizOn changelog. Try the new features at horizon.pm and tell us in the horizOn Discord what you build with them.