Hi there 
I’ve been wondering if it’s even a realistic goal to make a multiplayer indie-game, with the intention of making it a financial success. By financial success I’m not speaking about earning huge amount of cash, but at least something that’s earning more than it costs 
I got a few questions in that regard:
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How do indiegame developers manage do make profits on multiplayer games that dont include microtransactions? Wont the cost of keeping the game online, slowly eat up all profits regardless of it’s success? (the more players that’s buying the game, the more bandwidth they’ll use)
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Is p2p multiplayer without cost for the developers or does that also include a monthly bill? If not, what’s the drawback?
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If a game cost 10 dollars, how long does it have to run before those 10 dollars have been spend, by that particular player, playing online?
To put the last question in perspective, I’m talking about cooperative diablo-ish action hack’n slash game.
There is no need for more than 6 players being in the same game, but i have no idea if that’s a good thing or not cost-wise to have several small games rather than one big?
I hope my questions make sense and are answerable
Thank you for reading.
if you’re going to use Unet, unity is charging 49 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth if you end up using their relay servers. the monthly cost on this depends on how much bandwidth your game uses. there’s a basic slider on this page Game Development Software: Build a Multiplayer Game | Unity which can help give you a rough idea of what you could expect in terms of a monthly cost. notice that on this page it’s based off 50,000 monthly players/500 concurrent users…which is quite optimistic for most indies.
if you want to save some money on the relay servers without shaking things up too much, there’s a decent NAT traversal plugin on the asset store https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/58948 …it basically tries to establish a more direct connection between players and cut the relay server out of the mix entirely. meaning your server costs basically vanish. however in my experience, the plugin has only worked for 40% of all people who want to host a game, falling back on the relay server where it can’t establish a connection. still, you could be looking at saving a ton of money with this plugin. one other minor point about this plugin - it requires a separate server you manage that will be running a ‘facilitator’ app on it - this app helps two players find a common port they can connect through. so you will potentially also have a small cost for that server, but it should be very, very low.
i’m in the process of ripping apart Unet’s HLAPI to use Steam’s p2p networking while still getting all the cool stuff from Unet like server/client, commands/rpcs, etc. so that’s another option for you. drawbacks: 1. it’s a pain to get working. 2. you would be tied to the steam ecosystem, making porting to another platform impossible without cooking up another underlying networking solution. 3. it requires some modifications to unet’s source code, which can make upgrading your unity version a hassle.
Thank you. But what Game Pace would you put a game like Diablo 2 under? And same for diablo 3?
Do 3d take up alot more bandwidth than 2d isometric, or is it more a question about amounts of commands per second?
As with so many things networking, “it depends”. If your players movement is more of a click-to-move-to-point style, then that can reduce the number of updates across the wire. If it is “realtime” movement, then you are probably going to require more bandwidth. Number of enemies that need to be sync’ed * data about them per-update, etc etc. There are many many elements of how you design the game itself which go into this calculation, and even then there are lots of optimizations which can be used to further reduce your required bandwidth. You should really read this article and all the follow ups - What every programmer needs to know about game networking - Good luck!