one-on-one game for iPhone and Facebook - dedicated server architecture required?

Unity Engine
1

Hey guys,

we’re going to develop an one-on-one casual game for iPhone and Facebook with probably a very huge user base. On each platform the player will login with his Facebook account and either invites somebody from his friendlist or gets a random competitor. The highscores will be updated in a leaderboard on a dedicated server. It would be great, if users were able to make cross-platform matches, but this is not a required feature.

Would you recommend implementing this with an own server architecture (if so, we would choose Photon)? What about the running costs for the dedicated game servers? Of course this depends on data exchange, but even if it’s not that much for each game, it will be a lot for the amount of users playing worldwide.

Couldn’t be peer-to-peer connection an option for us? Game Center for iPhone can support up to four players for free (Btw does anybody know, if this works with 3G, too? Apple’s documentation only talks about Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.). And for Facebook just a master server which helps to connect players with each other? Or maybe a cloud service like Heroku or similar?

Any advices appreciated :slight_smile:

2

The big benefit of having a dedicated server is connectivity. If you want to get multiple iOS devices into a game there are several hurdles and connections fail more often than not.
Failed connections are not only bad in terms of a single user’s experience. Both players will encounter the same issue and maybe you loose customers.
That’s the feedback we got from customers that develop for iOS and Android alike. This applies to all P2P connections as well. The problem here are the carriers which don’t route all traffic from the net (or other carriers) to their customer’s phones.

The running costs are extremely hard to guess without any info on the game and how active the interaction will be. If the game is less action oriented, the server will handle many more concurrent connections and this saves money in the end. Bandwidth is a factor, too, but usually not as much as pure hosting costs.

3

Thanks a lot for your assessment Tobias. The more we think about and implement research, the more we realize, that the dedicated server architecture seems to be best suited for our needs. So, we’ll have a deeper look into Photon now…