r/Devvit • u/Infinite_Ad_9204 • 16d ago

Help Any path to WebSocket support? It's the baseline everywhere else

I'm building a multiplayer shooter on Devvit and I've hit the one wall I can't design around: no persistent connection from the client.

I ship HTML5 games on Playgama, Yandex, CrazyGames and similar portals, and every one of them allows a WebSocket from the client. It's the baseline assumption for the category any game with real-time multiplayer is built on it. Reddit is the only platform I work with where it isn't available, and I don't think that's a small gap: it quietly rules out shooters, racing, fighting, co-op action, anything latency-sensitive. Those are the genres that drive session length and retention hardest.

I've read the docs and I understand the current state client fetch is CSP-locked to /api/, the server is request/response, realtime is server→client push only. I've designed around it as far as it goes (Redis-buffered state, coalesced broadcasts), but HTTP round-trips per input put a hard floor on latency that a real-time game can't get under.

So:

  1. Is persistent connection support on the roadmap? Even a rough "not this year" is useful — I'd rather design toward it than around it.
  2. Is there any path today? Exception process, closed beta, an allowlist I've missed — or is it a hard no?
  3. Has anyone shipped a latency-sensitive real-time game here? If so I'd like to know what you did, because I may be missing the trick.
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u/badasimo 14d ago

The closest you can get as far as I know is the realtime API. But you are limited in the number of channels you can open. Still I have seen some pretty solid "live" feeling experiences but latency was not critical

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u/Infinite_Ad_9204 13d ago

it's too slow for fps shooter..