Question Offline Lobby

This is not currently possible. A host can create a lobby and not delete it when they go offline, but the lobby will go inactive if it is not being heartbeated and will eventually be deleted (after about an hour).

We are in the process of validating some changes to support service authentication for Lobby (using something like Cloud Code, or a custom game service) that could allow you to have a lobby that is "owned" by a service (as opposed to a player) which would allow you to keep the lobby alive even if all the members are offline. You could then keep the lobby active to prevent it from being deleted and accomplish this scenario.

 

There are a bunch of different ways to accomplish what you want depending on the specifics. The Lobby service is not a database itself, but it can be used to hold a small amount of data. As an example, if you were building an async card game, you could probably use lobby to hold the information about which cards each person had. If you need to hold more data than that, then you could potentially use the CloudSave service to hold the game metadata and have the Service or CloudCode load that metadata whenever a player submits a move.

Separately from that, for creating a lobby and sending notifications about it, Unity doesn't currently have a system that allows sending notifications to users (online or offline). There is some work in progress around that, but we don't have a timeframe for it yet. The way I would accomplish this right now would be to have a service create a lobby and then use some other mechanism for sending an invite. For example if your game is on Steam, you could use the Steam messaging system to notify the other player about the lobby. Then when that player launches the game they can join the lobby and trigger the service to start the game.