In a distributed authority topology, game clients share responsibility for owning and tracking the state of objects in the network and have the authority to spawn and manage objects themselves, with additional options to configure ownership permissions. A small, lightweight central state service keeps track of changes in spawned object states and routes network traffic. There is no central server simulating the game: all clients run their partial simulations and communicate their updates directly to other clients (via the central state service).

Distributed authority is also distinct from peer-to-peer models because it still involves a central service that all clients are connected to, rather than a model where communication is client-to-client, or all clients broadcast to all other clients.