TL;DR: How do we actually use the hosted matches APIs from GameKit? We host our own servers and would like to use Game Center matchmaking and invite systems to get players together into a match. For that, we're using GKMatchmaker findPlayersForHostedRequest:withCompletionHandler:, both for sending invites to friends and for matching players that don't know each other. On both cases, we get a GKPlayer for the invited player or a list of GKPlayers respectively. Up to this point everything is as expected and works without issues. Now the issue we have is that in both scenarios, the remote player GKPlayer gamePlayerID and teamPlayerID are some sort of random number: DATA FROM INVITE OR MATCHMAKING recipientResponseHandler (Invite sender perspective) Name:InviteReceiver TeamPlayerID:165662439500382624 GamePlayerID:165662439500382624 PlayerID:UNIQUE_ID_RECEIVER player didAcceptInvite (Invited player perspective) Name:InviteSender TeamPlayerID:165662439889816800 GamePlayerID:165662439889816800 PlayerID:UNIQUE_ID_SENDER ///////////////////////// DATA THE LOCAL PLAYER SEE ABOUT THEMSELVES Actual invite receiver data Name:InviteReceiver TeamPlayerID:UNIQUE_TEAM_ID_RECEIVER GamePlayerID:UNIQUE_GP_ID_RECEIVER PlayerID:UNIQUE_ID_RECEIVER Actual invite sender data Name:InviteSender TeamPlayerID:UNIQUE_TEAM_ID_SENDER GamePlayerID:UNIQUE_GP_ID_SENDER PlayerID:UNIQUE_ID_SENDER I need to use this data to get them into the same match/server. Both have access to our backend and given some sort of stable ID that would be simple. The root of the problem is that I can't really use name or alias to do this and playerID, which is the only stable id, is marked as deprecated. This leaves teamPlayerID and gamePlayerID, which simply don't match when viewed from the other players perspective. I've been thru all the documentation and samples I could find but none helped. GKBasePlayer has a playerID which is not marked as deprecated and given GKPlayer and GKLocalPlayer are subclasses, I could just cast to it and use the "non-deprecated" id there.... but it not being marked as deprecated is probably just an error on the documentation. Thanks for reading.