I am making a simple 4 player multiplayer game and I was looking at photon pricing plans I was wondering if 1,000 CCU is enough for 10k installs on a multiplayer steam game.
It mostly depends on the current lifetime of your project.
If your project is brand new, players will connect A LOT because it is new. At this stage, you have to consider the timezone of your user. Your game can have like 25 to 50% of the users connected at most if your game is very anticipated. But over time it will slow down, quite fast.
There are so many parameters, it is hard to answer your question.
1k connect for 10k clients (so 10%) seems to be low the first days after the release. BUT, it will drop very fast to something waaaaay under 10% of connected clients after few days.
So basically, you have to deal with the release, the highest peak. After that, things will go down fast. It’s up to you if you want to be able to deal with all the people at release OR if you prefer to wait for activities to goes down (risking to frustrate players because they can’t connect or have bad performances the first days). A way to better deal with it is to split your release. For example if you do a “pre-release” for a part of your player base (like for only the player who have pre-purchased the game) who have access to the game sooner, you will smooth the number of connection on release.