Is there a way to keep empty room?

Tobias wrote:

If the server wouldn't clean up rooms when the last player leaves, it would flow over with empty rooms after a while.

One could of course prevent this problem by implementing something like allowing a maximum number of empty rooms per and providing an interface in the dashboard for managing empty rooms, We could even offer payed upgrades to the amount of allowed empty rooms, so one would pay x dollar exra a month for x extra empty rooms. Its for sure technically possible. It just does not make much sense or would be worth the effort, as it is just a waste of server ressources to hold empty room on the server, when a client can just create them on the fly, when a room is needed. If its enough, to just display a room, that does not exist as empty in the client UI and create it, when a user actually want to join it, why should one then already hold it on the server?

The only reason for emtpy rooms would be having consistent long term games: If one round of a game can last for weeks, months or even years and the players would just play for a few hours a day, then it would make sense to keep information about the current game state between these sessions, so that they could continue, where they have stopped the last session, but still get updates to the game state, that have been triggered by other players in the meantime, which they would not get, when this information woul be stored offline on the clients an one client would change the world, but leave it, beofre another one joins it.
However in such a scenario closing the room and storing its current state on a database server, when the last player leaves, and recreate the room with the most up to date info from the database, when the first player join it again, would be a better solution than holding the rooms open. This can easily be achieved with custom server logic on a self hosted Photon server or in a Photon Private cloud (before the question comes up: a Photon private cloud, setup, managed and hosted by us solely for a single customer does not make much sense economically for the customer, if the expected CCU is below 10.000, which in most cases means 1 to 10 million monthly active endusers, so this option is only intended for the really big boys, everone else will be better of with our public cloud or with self-hosting a Photon server).