Trying to figure out best setup for f2p fps dedicated servers

Unity Engine
1

I apologize if any of this is very basic, any help would be greatly appreciated. We are a team of 2 and I am the main programmer.

We are developing an fps game that involves teams of wizards that use magic spells to duel each other. I wouldn’t imagine having more than 8 on 8 and I am designing primarily for 4 on 4. I have built networking code in Unity and have a minimum viable product of one on one for about 20 spells and defenses and such. It is currently a semi-authoritative server with spells being authoritative and players being client controlled.

Recently I have realized that we really should move over to an fully authoritative server. Refactoring this change is not my main concern. In our discussions on the refactor we were thinking we really want to move toward free to play. It works much better with our game design and our game is multi-player only so it is critical for us to have a population.

My main question is feasibility of dedicated fps servers. Our game doesn’t need much physics calculations. Currently the spells are being driven with vector calculations in code. The main physics we need is collision detection, triggers, and player movement. I am debating on running a headless unity instance on the server for each game or using a setup of a server and third party physics engine for doing the collisions and triggers. Not having to run a unity instance seems like it would greatly improve performance but would make the coding much more complicated than using Unity.

My questions are:

  1. Is dedicated server cost a very important cost in a f2p being profitable so that I need to prioritize minimizing server cost over development speed? Is running headless unity instances a bad decision because of the costs.

  2. Which networking engines are really good options for this scenario. Currently I am looking at photon server(not pun), bolt, and Ulink. Other good options?

  3. How difficult is it to setup server configurations that are viable. I have setup apache and other web servers before, I can create simple scripts for creating processes, but I am not an admin and I am wondering if we should contract this out or if it is can be done by me. I can learn quickly but I don’t want to take on a task that really should be done by professional in this area.

  4. What are typical variable costs of dedicated fps servers for each 100 ccu. What fixed costs are a huge factor.

We are trying to do a lot of research to answer these questions. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2

So we did a calculation that has some guesses that we think are mostly conservative. Our current website provider is liquid web which is more expensive, but has great support. So if we had one dedicated server only, that box would be $180 per month. Our game appeals more toward hardcore gamers rather than mobile, so we are guessing an average of $5 from a paying customer.

That makes 36 paying customers we would need each month. I am guessing 5% of registered users would be paying customers, so 720 registered users. Now about 1% of registered users are online at a given time, so 7.2 ccu. One game supports 8 players, so approximately one game needs to be supported by the box performance wise for us to break even on server costs.

These are headless games, so the box should be able to support way more than one game. We take from this that networking is not a significant cost compared to revenue. So it looks like it is more important to have a lot of users, and keep the paying customers happy by having lots of people to play with. This makes sense given the free-to-play model. Some of my calculations are going to be off, but I wanted a rough estimate.

Are there any major problems with our calculations? Something we are missing that could throw this napkin calculation way off?