UNet p2p + Steamworks Matchmaking?

Unity Engine
1

I am planning a small, free multiplayer game for 8 players. I am looking for the right tools to use.
I am an indie developer who doesn’t want to spend bags of money on Relay Servers. So I wanted to use:
A) Steam Matchmaking
B) Unet direct P2P Networking (not matchmaking)

the questions are:

  1. I have found a tutorial here http://www.unitystudygroup.com/unetsteam on implementing Steamworks Multiplayer, but I am sceptical about what next. After the players join lobby and I tell them the ip of the server to connect to directly, won’t Firewall and NAT make problems? (as with direct p2p connection, you have to forward ports, bypass NAT and prepare other dark magic rituals to connect the players).Same goes in the game, if the players are already in the game (so operating on Unet and not on Steamworks now), will it suddenly disconnect, lag and make problems with firewalls?
  2. Will Network Manager and Network Identity generate any surprise costs of bandwith, concurent users or other stuff on Unity side? Or it’s safe and free solution?
  3. Is Steam Matchmaking free? I tried to find any pricing but I’ve found no info on that. I know that Photon and Unity matchmaking costs quite a lot for an indie free game with no income planned.
  4. It’s amazing that I have not yet found a single video tutorial which could help me with this situation (steam matchamking + Unet). Are there no other tutorials of directly implementing Steam Matchmaking into Unity? Or am I just bad atsearching? :stuck_out_tongue:
  5. so Unet get’s dumped in some future unity version. If I will work on current Unity version and not upgrade, will it kill the Unet features in the games I may publish in the future?
2

The Unity costs are not associated with Unet itself, but the Unity Multiplayer Service (which itself has been announced it will be shut down as some yet undefined date). Costs for that service are based on bandwidth usage, so can vary wildly depending on how efficient you are with the data you send.

I’ve never used Steam networking, so can’t comment on that. Though I don’t think it is a good idea to be planning a game which will use Unet at this point.

If you stick to a version of Unity which still includes Unet it will still be there for you after it is removed from the engine around 2019.2, in all its buggy glory. When the Unity Multiplayer Service is shut down, any functionality of your game using it will cease functioning, regardless of the Unity version you built with (that’s the relay service you may be using from what it sounds).