Thanks for the input! This will be a 2-4 player board game involving cards, and we plan to target PC (Steam) and iOS, and we do plan to make it slightly competitive, but a bit less so than what you would expect out of an MMO, FPS or MOBA game (it’s much more relaxed than any real-time, action-based game). A single session will take up very little of our CPU power, so until we grow our userbase & finally start turning a profit, we plan to utilize this server for everything – matchmaking lobby, game sessions, databases… basically everything besides our actual website. I am rather fluent in C++, so that’s not really an issue here either. It’s mainly just the idea of getting UE4 to play nice with this sort of implementation, until it’s within our budget to acquire more physical servers.
Does UE4 support any sort of raw TCP/UDP send/receive? If that’s the case, then I suppose running multiple instances of the game could work, as I could just write a small console app in C++ which would act as the session manager & matchmaker, then have all clients connect to that, which would also be responsible for starting new server-side instances of our game. Hopefully this idea isn’t too far-fetched?