Core Concepts

This document lays out the high level concepts behind Gamers Lab, so the rest of the documentation is quicker to follow. It is not required reading, but it is a fast way to get up to speed on how the platform fits together.

1. Actors

Gamers Lab serves three primary groups.

• Game Studios: provide game data to the Gamers Lab platform.
• UGC App Developers: consume data from Gamers Lab. They are sometimes called subscribers, because they subscribe to the data pipelines of different game studios.
• Players: the video game players who interact with Gamers Lab indirectly through games and UGC apps. They only deal with the platform directly when managing their universal profile or signing in through Gamers Lab Auth.

2. Authentication Model

Because Gamers Lab serves three different groups, it separates authentication into three identity types, each with its own flow:

• Game Studios authenticate with X-Game-Key, a write only key used to stream data into Gamers Lab.
• UGC Apps authenticate with read only API keys, scoped to a specific tenant's rules, to retrieve both historical and live data streams.
• Players authenticate through platform-native providers, such as Steam, Epic, EVM wallets, one time codes, and more.

3. Game Studios

3.1 Multi-Tenant Isolation

The platform is organized around workspaces (game studios) and tenants.

All data, API keys, and access policies are scoped to a single tenant.

• A tenant represents a single game or environment (for example development, staging, or production).
• Each tenant owns its data, access policies, API keys, and visibility rules.
• A single company may operate multiple tenants across multiple titles or environments.

Tenant isolation is enforced at every layer of the system: ingestion, storage, streaming, and historical queries.

3.2 Data Ingestion

Games send structured data to Gamers Lab using a write only API key (X-Game-Key), scoped to a specific tenant.

Every record is validated, canonicalized, and written to append-only ledger tables with deterministic row hashes. Triggers prevent updates and deletes, so the historical record stays immutable and auditable.

Ingested data is structured into:

• player sessions,
• match sessions,
• in-match events,
• global player events,
• and match results.

3.3 Game Keys

Each tenant can create a limited number of write only Game Keys, which authenticate a video game to Gamers Lab. As the name suggests, these keys only allow data to flow in one direction, into the platform. The only exceptions are server return messages and registered player profile information.

This one way design is a safety feature. It keeps unexpected data from being written back into the game and stops data leaking through the key. Keys can be tightly scoped, rotated, and revoked at any time.

3.4 Data Privacy and Redaction

Tenants control how their data is exposed through configurable profiles. Each profile sets the visibility of every data type and supports filtering and optional time delays. Data can be scoped further to the public, teams, individual players, game hosts, and more.

For example, a studio might make its game data available only to the player who owns it, or release it publicly but only 15 minutes after a match has finished.

4. UGC Application Developers

4.1 Account Access

UGC app developers must first create an account with Gamers Lab and verify their email. Once their workspace is set up, they can subscribe to any game (tenant) that a Game Studio has published. Some games are open for anyone to subscribe to, while others require a short request form that the Studio can approve or reject.

Each subscription comes with its own read only API key. The key can optionally be locked to your website using CORS, alongside other privacy controls.

Every key has a maximum rate limit and can be monitored from the UGC developer dashboard, with webhooks and email alerts for activity and usage.

5. Players

5.1 Player Authorization

Gamers Lab supports login through a variety of methods, including Steam, Epic, email one time codes, and more.

Players are authorized through the Game Studio write key from within the game itself. A game cannot write data for a player until that player has been authorized. For example, Game A cannot record player data in Gamers Lab until the player has authorized their Steam account, which happens automatically behind the scenes when the game is launched through Steam. This prevents malicious games from impersonating players and writing false data on their behalf.

5.2 Gamers Lab Website

Players can sign in to the Gamers Lab website to manage their public profile, control which games can access their data, or delete their account entirely. Accounts cannot be created here directly. A player's account is created the first time they play a Gamers Lab enabled game.