I wonder if there’s any free matchmaking system or any workaround for this? I’m a solo developer with a limited budget. All I want to do is matching the players, and the rest will be P2P logic.
Did you check out Playfab? It is free for 100k players and has generous allowance for usage
Epic Online Services.
Yeah, I’ve been toying with Epic Online Services as a test platform and it’s pretty neat. I’m working on a Rust crate for the C version for my own engine.
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Purely my opinion: I would be wary of totally “free” services. They make money off of you end of day, so think about whether the trade off is worth it.
Putting that aside, there are other considerations too such as service operations (EOS has no SLAs or escalation). History of operations is something to consider too. They are pretty new to the ‘cloud services’ space and the cost of migration for a live game is expensive.
If you believe it’s only the “free” services making money off of you in some way that isn’t a direct payment you’re kidding yourself. If you care about this sort of thing you need to either hosting an open source solution or host a homebrew one.
Yeah, you are right about that. It’s just something to considering a service.
Generally a paid service is less likely to use your data and analytics directly for profit though. Their customers are paying a premium for a specific service and expectations… but there aren’t really any expectations or deliverables for a service offered for free.
For example, protonmail has a strong incentive to keep user data private as it’s what their business model and revenues is built on. Gmail on the other hand is 100% free but it’s not a secret on how they generate revenue from their service.
We place a lot of trust these days over our data to service providers and it’s important to at least consider the pros / cons.
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Protonmail and most game services are entirely different. Even paid gaming services collect as much user data as they’re legally allowed to get away with.
You can use the open source OpenMatch, although of course you will have to host it yourself.
Or you could read the ToS/EULA and if it turns out they are violating it by gathering more data from your users, you can sue them for incredible amounts in court. By the way, paid service providers can also violate their ToS/EULA.