Introduction to Authentication
Overview
AccelByte Gaming Services (AGS) provides a range of authentication methods, enabling flexibility when authenticating your players and admins.
Authentication options include:
- Anonymous login with a custom device ID
- Login with an email and password
- Support for game platform and social media Identity Providers, such as: Steam, Epic, PlayStation, XBox, Google, Facebook and others
- Support for Enterprise identity providers: Azure Active Directory , Google Workspace, and OpenID Connect.
Best practices
Use anonymous login for development only
Anonymous login with a custom device ID is simple to use and designed to facilitate your development and integration with AGS.
Anonymous login signs the user in with a custom device ID, which should be a unique identifier of a device that your game provides. This returns an access token that you can use subsequently for API calls that require an authenticated user. You can create a Headless account the first time a user signs in with an unused customer device ID.
As you don't need user input, it's the most developer friendly method to get an AccelByte account and authenticated user token for testing and debugging purposes.
However, the account is lost and hard to recover if the user loses or breaks their device. Unless you are sure you want an anonymous login in your published games, you should replace it with another authentication method before your launch.
Use Enterprise identity providers for admin authentication
If you already have an enterprise authentication system like Azure Active Directory, Google Workspace, or any OpenID Connect compliant system, a single sign-on experience is convenient. It automatically grants access to your admin users by setting the authentication system up as an external identity provider in AccelByte's system.
Next steps
Set up your preferred third-party authentication method in AGS. Refer to the guides in this section.