Distributed Authority free or paid?

Hello, I’m currenctly trying to chose between network topoliges and was looking into Distributed Authority. And I want to ask if it is free? As I understood from this quote:


It is free right now but will be paid when beta ends, since Distibuted Authority depends on Multiplayer Services which are paid.
Am I right?

Yeaahhhh, i guess

but is it a cheaper option.? If so…

What do you mean by cheaper? As far as I know for example ClientHosted and DedicatedServer are free options.
I like how DestributedAuthority works but if it’s paid it’s not my option and I would prefer ClientHosted

I know as much you do.

Im uneducated on this topic. Someone plz answer. Im also a beginner

Well as it turns out it’s paid. but it’s so cheap that it’s fair to say it’s almost free

More info here:

Careful with that assessment, although I agree in general.

$0.001 seems “cheap” but you have to multiply that number with a much higher number: number of players times number of hours they spend ingame. :wink:

The free tier connectivity hours are worth $6 (6,000 times $0.001).

Assume you have 1,000 players in a given month each spending 10 hours in the game, this makes for 10,000 connectivity hours and thus $10 (you pay $4 for the part above the free tier).

Let’s factor in the bandwidth. The free tier is worth between $9 to $16 depending on where your players are.

Many network games are badly (terribly) unoptimized when it comes to bandwidth. Eg things like sending all player’s data around in its entirety rather than what was changed. And of course nothing is bytepacked or compressed and even strings are being sent around frequently.

So let’s assume a rather high traffic volume of 1 MB/s per player. Times 10,000 hours spent playing gives you 10 GiB traffic. Okay seems like you’ll be fine traffic-wise. Wait … per second? Yes, that 1 MB/s is actually 3.6 GB per hour … times 10,000 hours equals 36,000 GB per month!

Therefore, you’d be paying somewhere around $3,600 per month for traffic! :exploding_head:

You can do the rest to see what happens if your game gets hyped by an influencer and all of a sudden the player base jumps to ten or one hundred times higher for a month. Assuming this includes a bump in game sales you ought to come out with a huge net benefit. But there are cases where this goes against you, mainly very cheaply priced games or even free to play games with just microtransactions or ads that may not scale nearly as well with the number of players.

1 Like

Woah💀
I guess these numbers are not so big if the game made good income. But need to rember that you’ll have to pay even for the people who didn’t buy the game and just pirated it.

Pirates: the reason why you want to use a cloud service for online multiplayer without which online play won‘t work. It could be as little as requiring player authentication for nothing but to fend off those who pirated the game.

1 Like

This is a really cool thing, need to check on that.