A lot of the Indie developers put in a huge amount of man hours to help Unity fix their online package and they repay them with insane rates.
Below, you can see creating a demo CCGKit game, using default settings.
What Unity wants to make this game LIVE
How many Indie developers are going to make the mistake of turning this on and having their lives ruined?
View Screenshot
The rates are perfectly reasonable when it comes to running a dedicated server for your game. Dedicated servers aren’t cheap.
So your question is, shouldn’t the price be lowered because it’s more than you’d like to pay? I wish everything in life worked that way 
Seriously though, maybe shop around and check the alternatives? Perhaps this isn’t the right solution for your game and something else would be more suitable.
The question should be:
How can an Indie person be able to create an IOS game, maybe bring in $1000 in sales per month and be able to have it multiplayer?
I am sure SteveJ creates apps and he makes millions on them and can afford to use UNET, but what about the rest?
You can have multiplayer without UNET
I am wondering what everyone is doing for multiplayer? Besides going to Unreal.
@Murgilod , I did not know that. I figured UNET was multiplayer, I have other multiplayer solutions (forge). Where can I read up on doing this?
I am looking at adding multiplayer to my game, but would like to use something that I could afford.
iOS provides Game Center matchmaking. If you need lots of people in the same session you can also run your own servers by using the provider you want.
You can also use uNet without using Unity’s matchmaking services. There are numerous hosting companies out there.
Could Unity provide a free hosting service when game creators use their Ad service, in effect Ad revenue would pay for the services used to host the game.
Ideally with the option for players to purchase a season pass to turn off the ads and pay for the service.
Then game developers can focus on write multiplayer games, release them and if they take off look at their options.
have you looked at photon cloud? the pricing is very very competitive and its only $0.05 per extra GB on most of the packages. its also very easy to implement, probably your best bet.
but yes, I agree the pricing for UNET is a little excessive, but unity is a company and well within there right to charge what they want. The engine is free after all…
You’d need a minimum threshold. After all a dedicated server costs a good deal of money per month.
Would it need to be dedicated one per game?
Could a server or set of servers be shared across a range of new games.
Or virtualized across a range of servers, with dynamic bandwidth/processor allocation depending on usage.
With games that become popular and gaining the Ad revenue levels needed to go full server could be migrated/promoted.
You could rent a dedicated server or a VPS, and then set up your own server for hosting your game if you want to do it lowest cost.
Servers for fast pace action games are expensive. You have said that you will have 50000 MAU playing a fast paced action game.
If you can’t make $3000 a month off of 50,000 MAU, you should really reconsider your business plan. That might include not supporting multiplayer.
You also have indicated that you are sending 30 messages per second. That is a huge amount of data. It might be appropriate for a modern FPS shooter, but its not really needed for most indie games. The fact that each player is estimated to use 11GB of data a month should have given you a clue. That’s a lot of traffic. You can get around this by building a slower game.
Finally this only refers to traffic that runs through the Unity matchmaker and relay servers. If the amount of money really is a problem, you can always implement a different networking solution. Nothing says you have to use UNet, or that you can’t use a hybrid of UNet and some other solution. Its entirely possible to use UNet just for matchmaking, and then connect directly between your machines. Or a variety of other options. All of these are more complex technically, but might work out cheaper.
Thanks for the info, I am a big fan of Unity, been around since version 3. I am looking into using multiplayer and wanted to know how other people are handling $. Do u charge x per month for multiplayer? Ads?
I am looking to the Unity Community for your expert advice. What is the best way to implement multiplayer and have it sustain itself.
I like that idea and will run some numbers to see if it will pay for it’s self.
It would be interesting to see if Photon, Forge or brainCloud. Has anyone used any of these and have prices??
Not all UNet games use UnityAds. Not all UnityAds games use UNet. Coupling the two services makes no sense.
Gotta agree with @Kiwasi , using Unity’s calculator it came out at roughtly $300.00 a month for 100,000 users based on an MMORPG… I think you’re seriously over estimating the amount of bandwidth you’re going to use in terms of the actual game, unless you’re doing something like compressed procedural content updates (or component replication) which is generally quite rare, it’s usually just RPC / replication from the authoritive.
Even with RPC’s and replication, you could use specific algorithms like time frequency decay / increase to save bandwidth on certain components etc.
It depends on what you’d prefer, either an up front cost or an all in monthly… Rolling your own solution is far from cheap, I looked into the cost of turning a game into an MMO a while back. So you’ll need some decent firewalls like Cisco ASA 5506’s for IDS / IPS / Load Balancing / HA / DMZ and decent routers then some servers like Dell T20’s which would need some upgrades but price / power ain’t bad. You don’t need servers, but as quick redundancy is key then hot swap HDD’s / PSU’s is a good idea.
Finally some business class fibre connections, I specc’d up a 400Mbps (4X 100Mbps) PPPOE lines and it came in at around $320.00 a month w/ 5 - 8K for the hardware. Yes it might sound OTT, but there’s other things to consider like patch management / upgrades / websites and media.
Also the solution has to be scalable (it could support 250K concurrent connections), nothing tanks an MMO like users not being able to log in.
So when you factor in Unity pays for hardware / secure systems / 24 hour operations / support / bandwidth and creates an API for you to use it’s not such a bad deal is it?