Since Unity has built-in stuff for Exit Game’s “Photon” system and vice-versa, I looked at Photon’s server and cloud packages today. One in particular puzzled me: one of their server packages says it offers unlimited concurrent users for a lifetime (!) for only a single one-time fee of $3,500 without any monthly charges or other fees later on. How is this feasible, and what does “unlimited” actually mean in practical terms before : a) the system slows to a crawl, or b) Photon shuts down your application because it’s clogging their system ?
Or am I missing something?
Here’s the page: Multiplayer Game Development Made Easy | Photon Engine
The package you are talking about is their server software and not their hosted Photon Cloud solution it means that per server you can have unlimited concurrent users depending on if your server / bandwidth can handle.
Ok, but what about the $500 Server package in which you’re charged 50 cents per user, which sounds like it’s hosted by them. (Why don’t they make this stuff clear in their pricing info?)
Why don’t you contact them directly? If these are legitimate interest questions for a project then you should be speaking to ExitGames, not asking the Unity forums.
$3500 is a license fee to use their software on a single server running a single app.
$500 is the same, with the limit of 500 CCU. It also looks like they’ll license additional CCU for $0.50 a CCU - e.g. 600CCU would be $550.
This is all on their site, and worse comes to worse you can always email them/post on their forums.
Last I checked, Unity has about 0 built in features for Photon.
Their pricing is clear on their website. Unfortunately they don’t have the indie offer anymore which was on there a few weeks back.
But they informed me by email that more offers would come in the (near) future.
Just mail them and you will have a quick answer.
I was referring to the multiplayer modification of the Bootcamp demo, which is designed to work with Photon.
You mean the one made by Exit Games… i.e. the same people who make photon?
The $3,500 you are talking about is for Photon Server.
There are two flavors of Photon. Photon Server, and Photon Cloud.
Photon Cloud is hosted through them and is paid monthly.
Photon Server is hosted on YOUR hardware, using YOUR internet, using YOUR software.
The $3,500 fee allows you to have unlimited concurrent users (users logged in at the same time) and unlimited monthly active users. It is limited to the server it sits on and not the app it is running.
Meaning: If you have a game…which you want to split it up. 3 Physical Servers, 1 for Chat/Login server… 1 for Game server, 1 for the “Master” server, You would need 3 different $3,500 licenses.
Although I find the prices a bit heavy considering you use your own hardware/software, I can understand they are a business and want to make money for their hard work.
Photon Server pricing page now is at Server 5 Photon Server Intro | Photon Engine
That modification was offered by Exit Games, not Unity.
We just got the kind permission to use their demo assets for our tutorial. By now, the demo itself is so outdated, that we removed our version from the Asset Store, sorry.