This is the official Exit Games Photon Thread in the Unreal Engine forums, which serves as a first port of call, where we answer your questions about Photon.
Photon is a networking engine by Exit Games for the development of scalable cross-platform realtime multiplayer games.
Client SDKs for Desktop and Mobile platforms can be downloaded at Photon Engine SDKs | Photon Engine, Client SDKs for Game Consoles are provided upon request.
A tutorial by forum user about using Photon Server with Unreal Engine 4 can be found at http://nethersoft.de/.
Also looking at the site, the pricing, is that only if we were to use your servers? Would users be able to create their own servers without paying for server use on your network? (much like a steam server for example)…?
Is the code itself costing the devs or just the use of the servers? If we use the network solution for Unreal, are we bound to only use your servers at that point? Does this cross over to steam as well (hosted from your service but on the steam network)…?
With the network solution code, are users able to create their own servers from inside the project (ie: new game > host > play … and friends join)?
so many questions lol.
Well, a performance benchmark really isn’t of too much use if not done by yourself and specifically designed around your game.
If Exit Games would provide the benchmark comparison, then Photon would be lightyears ahead of Unreal Engines own networking and if Epic Games would provide it, then UE4s networking would be lightyears ahead of Photon, as there are just thousands of different ways to benchmark and the results will depend a lot on how much the designers of the benchmark know the products which they are benchmarking. @Angrytoilet:
There are multiple products available, that are linked in the start post of this thread. Each of them have their own pricing. Realtime and Chat are both hosted on the Photon Cloud and because that means monthly hosting costs for us, we also need to charge for them on a monthly-basis and can’t just sell them against a one-time fee. Photon Server is hosted by you and also available as a one-off license. Please have a look at the pricing pages of the different products on our website.
The clients for all Photon products are available free of charge and for all products there are free plans that are more than sufficient for development purposes so you don’t have to pay anything before actually releasing your game.
You can mix Unreal Engine networking and Photon networking and for example use Photon only for matchmaking, but Unreal for in-game networking, etc. if you want to.
I don’t get the Steam question. Could you rephrase it, please?
No, Photon is a client to server solution, and not a peer to peer one. You create a new game room from inside a client and join it with another client, but that game room is hosted on a server instance and not on one of the clients.
that last one answered it.
The reason i was asking all that, was not to put yall “on the spot”. Just simply would cause me to pay you guys thousands per month based on allowing users to create unlimited servers. Lets say i had 100k users. Maybe 10% created a server. That means i would have 10,000 servers created by users. That would be some serious billing lol. Again, its just not a good solution, for me, but, maybe for someone else that only needs 1 server (or a low number of them), or, someone that simply doesnt allow “private” servers to be created by the users.
Please be aware that the monthly subscription billing is for CCU (ConCurrent Users), which are much lower than the DAU (Daily Active Users), let alone the MAU (Monthly Active Users).
From our experience for the average app on Photon Cloud 100,000 MAU translate into 5,000 DAU and 250 CCU. If you had 100,000 CCU (which would put your game into the same league as World of Tanks, League of Legends and World of Warcraft), that would mean tens of millions of downloads/sells of your game.
Best news for your usecase last:
We offer a redistributable license for Photon Servers, which allows you to ship Photon Server instances to your endusers. The license allows your game to let your users host up to 100 concurrent server instances with up to 50 users each, which means up to 5,000 CCU, completely free of charge. If you want more than that, please contact us for a price quote.