Photon Licencing Questions

Eyeshock
edited September 2012 in Any Topic & Chat
Hi there. I've been coding a network library from scratch up to this point, and someone pointed me in the direction of Photon. It sounds incredibly useful, but I do have some questions about your licencing options.

First off, the monthly fees apply to running a master server and using cloud? Is it possible to use Photon without using a master server / cloud and if so, would you still charge that company a monthly fee? (my game uses direct connect)

Second off...actually that's the only question. Only reason I ask is that indie margin seems really low. At 10k, you'd be losing 10-30% of your income to server costs and if wasn't a pay-per-play it seems you'd be hosed.

I'll be playing with it in the meantime. Just out of curiosity. Thanks in advance for answers. :p

Comments

  • The monthly fee is for using the hosted solution.
    The prices there are concurrent users (so users online at the same time, not total number of users you have), if you get 10k users and end up paying 10-30% your monetize strategy is absolutely broken and flat out trash to be honest. At 10k concurrent users (which is equivalent to 1 - 10M monthly users), you should definitely make a serious amount of money (which means that the costs for photon will drop below even 0.1%) or you will not even be to pay your support staff that you will need to handle that amount of users.

    If you host it yourself (Lite or LoadBalancing) then its a flat fee but you naturally pay your hosting provider which will normally cost you 300-500 USD a month for hosting and traffic, if it has 10k concurrent users, expect it to be more in line with 10-20 times that due to the traffic costs.

    Also just to mention: Photon has no direct connect. Clients always connect to the backend and exchange messages over it. Otherwise the whole benefit of not being 'NAT troubled' or having server side logic and database integrations or whatever you might want to do is gone.
  • Indie
    You are an Indie if your monthly turn-over is below $10k.

    Not users.

    Edit: This more or less answers my question though. With no direct connect option, I really have no reason to pursue photon. I'll just stick to coding it. Thanks. :D
  • Ah, you got hit by the 'whats an indie and what not' definitions. I didn't even think of those 10k there
  • Indie prices are 9$/month for 100CCU to 349$/month for 5.000 CCU. 5.000 CCU usually means about 1 million of overall users of your game, so its very unlikely, that one needs this amount of CCU, but still counts as indie and like dreamora has pointed out, such numbers of users are causing quite a high amount of traffic costs, so we can't really offer lower prices for such amounts of CCU.
    Count with 500 CCU (100k total users of your game already (!) ) for 39$ a month, which would be 0,39% of the maximum indie turnover. Every CCU beyond that probably means, that you either have a higher turnover than 10k$ a month or you should really think about your monetizing strategy again.
    I am not sure however, how you have come to the idea of having to pay 10-30% of your turnover for Photon at a 10k turnover. Even with the 5.000CCU subscription it would just be 3,49% and as already mentioned at 5.000 CCU your turnover should normally have gone far beyond the indie criteria anyway.