How to publish a multiplayer game on Steam cost-effective
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How to publish a multiplayer game on Steam cost-effective
Tamoo
2022-07-18 16:51:26
Hey,
I'm currently developing my own "bigger" multiplayer game with PUN 2 and programmed it for ~100 hours. When it still was a small game I only thought about sending this game to friends only and than the free PUN 2 plan of 20 Concurrently Connected Users (CCU) is enough. But during my progress I thought about publishing this evergrowing game to a wider audience on Steam. What I understood is, that by using Steamworks I only get access to Steam Accounts and therefore Usernames as an example, but not the Steam Servers. So that means, that I would still use the Photon Servers, and I am limited by the max. CCU of my active plan.
Let's be honest: I will not get millions of players at the same time, but I do think it's possible to get more than 20 CCU.
After this long explanation I come to my question: What would be the best way, of dealing with a unknown amount of CCU via Steam very cheap? I don't have the funds to buy more Slots from Photon and have a monthly recurring payment. Is this even possible with Photon or do I need to switch networking solutions to Photon Fusion or even Mirror, which would be a real pain to implement.
If I misunderstood something completly with the Steamworks API and how this works with the Steam Server, please let me know.
Any ideas and suggestions would be appreciated 🙂
See ya
Comments
Kaiserludi
2022-07-18 18:53:16
Hi @Tamoo.
Are you planning to give the game away completely for free?
In that case you will have issues paying for the servers with any solution out there that is using servers.
Otherwise a small part of the money that you make from selling the game or from selling in-game stuff should be more than enough to pay for the servers.
For the average Photon-powered game the CCU cost equals 2.3% of the game's revenue. You can calculate with between 1% and 5% of your game's revenue depending on how well the game is monetized.
Hey, thanks for your reply,
yeah I thought about making it free, but I will keep this in mind, and maybe add In-Game purchases.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to transfer a game from PUN 2 to Fusion? And is it a good improvement, that is worth the effort?
The effort when switching from PUN 2 to Fusion depends on the game, really.
Likely, the benefit of using Fusion depends on how well you synchronized your game in PUN 2. Fusion is more precise than PUN 2 out of the box but once you found a suitable solution with PUN 2, the benefits of Fusion may be invisible. Technically, Fusion is much more advanced and effective. Also, it's the current solution which we will extend in the coming years. So those are benefits, no matter if the visuals would be the same.
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