Dear all,
It is with great pleasure that I would like to announce the release of Badumna 1.4. This version has a number of improvements over 1.3 and some exciting new features. We had more than 600 developers try out Badumna 1.3 and the valuable feedback that we received over the past few months has been carefully incorporated into this new version. Hope you have fun playing with Badumna. Go, get it from: www.badumna.com
Cheers
Holy wow is Badumna expensive, grads on the latest release though.
Nice release and congrats on finally getting some prices online 
But I fear I’ve to agree.
The costs, independent on what can potentially save or not, are totally out of scale for the 0 - 10000 CCU.
10000 CCU is the lowest CCU class for an MMO type of networking at all, so that should form the bronze one (even BigWorld got that and restricted the Indie to 10000 CCUs).
Also with the pricing you have there, no normally growing project can even consider using your technology as the project either must be funded and take off to the unlimited CCU or stands no chance cause with your fees they have to take unreasonable fees on their microtransactions to be able to even pay you …
I’ve to say that I hoped for more reasonable pricings in the light of HeroCloud, BigWorld Indie, SFS 2 and Photon 2, hell even NetDogs devs realized that with their pricing phantasies, the only thing that will happen is the end of their business … (they used to ask for 30k onetime for single node license just that this one already scaled up to your gold level on a normal server - yet even their multinode pricing phantasy would have worked out less expensive than badumna)
But I guess you will be going the same path as the netdog devs (that grew out of a universitary environment too) and get your fair share of “sorry but too expensive for us/ unrealistically priced” before you revise your calculations on adequate pricing in relation to the present competition and in relation to your original claim of “half as expansive as the traditional way” (you must be living in the bush with hamsters in wheels producing the electricity to get 1000 CCU ending less expensive your way than photon / smart fox even on their unlimited ccu + a dedicated i5 quad core box would cost), cause at the time you are 2-5 times as expensive, without considering the fact that the development time grows quite a bit due to the split around logic in relation to security, verification and believable data handling.
And yes I’m aware this is harsh but I asked for figures back then and you didn’t provide any information on how you measured the half as expensive and now I feel like my intuition back then was rather correct that you are basing your 50% off traditional way on totally wrong numbers
fantasy prices indeed. Badumna is not an option for me anymore.
Hi,
I’d like to make a few points about the pricing.
Firstly, the license is based on the number of concurrent users currently playing in the game, not what you think it eventually might reach if it is successful (in reference to Dreamora’s comment that ‘10000 CCU is the lowest CCU class for an MMO type of networking at all’). I think it is fair to say that at least 90% of the developers on this forum will qualify for the Indie license and that most multiplayer games will not exceed 200 concurrent users – so they will only ever require the $200 one-time license for the whole game. I think it is hard to argue that this is not great value.
Unlike some other solutions, the prices are per game, not per server. So the total cost of a solution offering ‘unlimited CCU per server’ depends on how many servers you require and the operating costs of the server/bandwidth.
The PRO MMO pricing is for large publishers that would generally be using an external hosting solution rather than a couple of in-house servers. The ongoing cost of running these servers is significant – consider the costs outlined in Funcom’s financials: http://www.funcom.com/wsp/funcom/frontend.cgi?func=publish.show&func_id=1400&table=CONTENT – Hosting and Bandwidth costs were about US$2.5M in 2009 and US$7.8M in 2008, plus major depreciation and impairments due to inactive server leases. Depending on the application, the Badumna peer-to-peer architecture can reduce these costs by between 50% and 80%.
If your multiplayer application is not server/bandwidth intensive (eg. social games) then we offer an alternative Custom license with lower pricing.
Finally, cost is only one of the considerations that should be made when selecting a server solution. Badumna enables developers to build ‘unsharded’ MMOs that create new game design possibilities, as well potentially unlimited scalability and improved performance :
http://www.scalify.com/badumna-benefits.php
Thanks
The Scalify Team
Pricing is something that people could discuss forever, and ultimately the customers and their wallets will decide if it’s worth the money they’re asking for. The indie license is fair, and if you have more than 200 (paying) customers then you could potentially afford $1k+ dollars per month, even if it does sound outrageous to small developers. Obviously you would need those 200 people to be paying you over $5/month each to afford this, assuming you have absolutely no staff and zero running costs, but hey…
My issue is that surely any large-scale MMO developers (ie, the type of multi-million dollar businesses that you keep mentioning and appear to be targeting) would laugh at the idea of a non-authoritative server setup? I don’t buy this “combat zone” thing, personally, unless this genuinely is something that people are doing in commercial network games these days. Given that, I would’ve expected this to be aimed squarely at the amateurs making half-assed free-to-play MMO games where nobody is overly concerned about cheating, not the big boys with millions who would quite obviously want to program their own network servers anyway.
I’m not trying to be a smart-ass (for once), as I am genuinely interested in Badumna despite being surprised by the “monthly charge” pricing structure you’ve revealed. I’m curious about who here would use it as anything but a standard “dedicated server” setup, relying on the auth peers to validate every packet. When it’s reduced to that, is it still competitive considering these prices? The “revolutionary approach” that you keep pushing is basically what all networked games before Quake used to do before everybody turned to dedicated servers to prevent cheating and offer some level of security. I don’t really see any more documentation in 1.4 about how this issue is solved, unless I’ve missed something. (Which is possible, as it’s 4am and I only just noticed that the new version (and Apple/Unity-tastic website) had been released)).
Thanks for the constructive feedback xomg. The 200 CCU limit is concurrent users – ie. logged on and playing at the same time, not the total number of players. So in your Indie example, it is more like 50 cents revenue per active user, rather than $5, assuming 10% of your active user base is playing at the same time (obviously depends on the game).
While there are games that require lots of server authentication (eg. WoW style), many other styles of multiplayer applications (eg. Kids games) have plenty of opportunities to gain significantly from a hybrid architecture. If developers are unclear about how they could use this approach in their game design then they should contact us for a chat and we can make some suggestions for their specific case.
Your pricing is absolutely outrageous.
Anyone capable of paying this ridiculous monthly amount is capable of writing his own gaming server.
scalify: the problem is that $0.5 / user / month is a rather high fee especially as you are only the network, you don’t cover development and software maintenance cost, don’t reduce hardware costs even remotely close enough (there is still the requirement for authorative servers for verification) and the support staff handling the customers paying the money to hopefully make in the $0.5 to push them to you wants to eat too.
Thats what I was hinting out above, your prices just don’t make sense for the CCU you tag them with, at least not with the monthly subscription model. There is no reasonable saving to none at all in using your technology, yet there is a significantly more complex client - server model to manage and design to fight cheating.
The Indie fee is reasonable.
The same would go for the others if they were one time fees, even if they were higher than now.
But $12000/ year for 1000 CCU or $60000 / year for 10000 CCU (or $240’000 - $300’000 for the normal life cycle of an MMO) is a number that to anyone with basic math should be able to identify as “not going to work out”.
What do you intend to offer for the subscription model? 1h premium services, 24/7 phone support, free on site incidents, new releases on a monthly base not 1-2 releases per year, handling bugfixes for reported bugs from bronze+ customers with priority (fixed in <= 4 weeks at worst)?
I’m unsure if you are even realize that your networking is in the order of a magnitude more expensive than whole industry proofen MMO technology licenses for indies?
What did your “business master mind” compare the fees against to work out that you are less expensive or even comparably expensive to traditional models in 2010 with todays hardware and traffic prices and with todays problems and consequences of worms and paranoia security making it falling back to modes where using player as nodes does not work.
Perhaps I’m just on a totally wrong end of the stick here but to me it seems like your calcs are assuming that server machines completely die 4 times a year, that 100 mb traffic cost $1+ and that alternative technologies cost $30000 per machine, cause otherwise it can not work out with a 4 year lifetime base
None the less, for the evaluation, research and experimentation, I will likely end on the indie somewhen later this year too
I’ve worked with all your competitors at a point in the past two years including the one likely forming your major competition, NetDog, so I’m interested to see how its behaving now on 1.4 and compare it to those, sharpen my knowledge and widen my horizon to be up to date on the available options as I a want to be able to offer the best possible advice to customers not the “only one I know” or “all but XX”
SmartFoxServer just released their pricing structure.
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/2X/buy.php
Seems very reasonable.
That would only be true if you were willing to take on 10 times more subscribers than your servers could handle, hoping that 90% of them never really make use of what they’re paying for. That’s called overselling.
Actually 15-25% is a rather accurate expectation of the average usage.
Unhappily, 5 PM through 11 PM commonly is above the average and the rest of the day below.
Thats why some games like Tibia (one of the oldest MMO still existing) has decided to use the split system with XXX CCUs usable by free, the rest reserved to premium.
Problem is for this to reasonably work out the indie would need to be 1000 CCU, with a 50 CCU as a “freely usable license”.
With such a 1000 CCU you could serve a userbase of something between 10k and 20k active users most of the time.
and if your game is about premium and non premium you could dedicate a share to premium only availability … but at 200 its all premium → no trial → no player …
and I doubt that you can actually buy a plentitude of indie for “distinct environments” nor is this the idea behind badumna …
To simply compare the price of the actual networking software would not result in a good commercial decision. It is like choosing a car and ignoring the costs for petrol and servicing, or ignoring the features of each car.
If you assume that there are no cost savings from P2P, or if your application has no functions that could use the P2P network, and there is no value for you in the performance or design benefits (eg. unsharded), then other networking solutions will have a lower Total Cost of Ownership - agreed. Determining whether there are design, performance and cost benefits for a given application is a separate discussion, and as noted before we’re happy to help people work through this on a case by case basis.
We are also working on a solution that combines Badumna with hosting into one package, so that may make the costs savings more visible.
Our Indie license is a $200 one-time fee. It would be reasonable to argue that the CCU limit is too low for Indies or there should be another Indie tier, but I do think this Indie solution is suitable for the vast majority of Unity developers creating multiplayer applications. There may be a couple hundred Indie games above that level but not thousands. Remember it is based on your actual concurrent users, not what you think you might achieve one day. Also, the CCU for the game over will presumably increase and then decrease over the lifecycle of the game, not max CCU from Day 1.
For the Pro license (ie. very few people reading this), the assumption in the example on our website (http://scalify.com/badumna-benefits.php) is that managed hosting of a dedicated server (ie. including servers, bandwidth, accommodation, cooling, support etc.) is $1K/month or $12K/year. Sure, this will be lower if you are running your own server in the bedroom and consider your own time to be ‘free’ – but that’s not the Pro market we are talking about here. For the multiplayer applications we have assessed one box can handle 250 CCU (400 in the website example), so multiple servers will be required. The max CCU per server depends on the application, and if you are running a game with low server/bandwidth requirements then talk to us about the Custom license.
Well, good luck with your product pricing model, I own unlimited ccu with unlimited server license for single game using photon, look at it this way, they got my money, you didn’t and I have all your features and then some.
Best regards and see you when you are reasonably priced…
FYI I used 2 outsourced servers dedicated and never reach 10 gig bandwidth a piece and pay less that $200 a month for both without that use case model you described. So, no, I do not get your new York times business figures.
Hi Everyone,
We’ve decided to revise the CCU limit for the Indie and offer some new Indie tiers with higher CCU limits. We’re certainly keen for Indies to use Badumna and we don’t want people to be concerned that they will be forced onto a Pro license prematurely. We obviously got that initial 200 CCU limit wrong.
So the entry level Indie will still be $200 one-time fee, but now 500 CCU Max.
1,000 CCU will be $1,000 one-time fee.
5,000 CCU will be $4,000 one-time fee.
All prices are per application, not per server. If you upgrade, you pay the difference.
Our Indie criteria is much the same as others - <$200K revenue and < 5 staff/contractors.
Our website will be updated shortly but the changes are effective immediately.
Thanks
The Scalify Team
Hi scalify,
I decided to take a look at Badumna with your new pricing. I downloaded the trial and found that there are some limitations on using Unity.
Badumna seems to work primarily with Unity 2.6 and only with the standalone version of Unity 3.
When will Badumna be compatible with the web player for Unity 3?
Thanks,
Steve
Hi Steve, We are in discussion with Unity Technologies to have Badumna support Unity 3.0 web player. I don’t have an ETA but expect this to be resolved in the coming months in a future update.
I’m surprised to see you modify the pricing so quickly, and I think that’s something to respect. I would’ve expected a public statement along the lines of “screw you, hippies” from most businesses, so kudos.
http://www.exitgames.com/Photon/Pricing
Photon CCU Cost Type License Info
50 0 USD Indie Single Cost
100 100 USD Indie Single Cost
500 450 USD Indie Single Cost
1000 950 USD Indie Single Cost
U 1450 USD Indie Single Cost
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/2X/buy.php
Smartfox CCU Cost Type License Info
100 0 Euros Indie Single Cost
500 750 Euros Commercial Single Cost
2000 1500 Euros Commercial Single Cost
5000 2500 Euros Commercial Single Cost
Unlimited 3500 Euros Commercial Single Cost
http://www.badumna.com
Baduma CCU Cost Type License Info
Unknown 0 Trial Trial Limited to 60 Minutes
500 200 USD Indie Single Cost
1000 1000 USD Commercial Per-Month - 12 month contract
5000 2500 USD Commercial Per-Month - 12 month contract
10000 5000 USD Commercial Per-Month - 12 month contract
U Unknown USD Commercial Per-Month - 12 month contract
Feature comparison could be added to this list if you like, would take a little bit to type them up, especially what they offer with regards to platforms that are supported for what you are paying for.