Options for PVP Multiplayer Hosting
I have been building PVP games in Horizon Worlds for the last year, and now that VR in Horizon worlds is going away I am looking at doing a native PVP VR game instead. I have used both unreal engine and unity, was leaning on using unity because I feel I may program quicker in Unity. I have some cloud experience using AWS, mostly hosting websites.
But for hosting or implementing Multiplayer, I am looking at options and others experiences. I am thinking of two main solutions, one being AWS (this is my go to for cloud tasks, but I use mostly for hosting websites) and proton (it sounds to good to be true, its free and you can have 100 concurrent users).
AWS likely will be a pain to setup and seems like it will cost more (which makes no sense to me, usually cheapest for most tasks).
Photon seems super cheap and easy to implement (sounds to good, feel like there is something I am missing).
Have any tried both methods, and how do they compare, or are their better solutions.
After doing some research, here is what I have found out.
For 1k peak concurrent users (CCU) on AWS GameLift it is about $239.02.
For 1k peak concurrent users (CCU) on Photon Fusion it is about $250.
With AWS GameLift it can vary a lot depending on usage, there are ways to both increase (more server extensive and packets) and decrease price (optimize, less logic on server and less packets).
Photon Fusion is a very attractive option for indie devs, because it gives 20 CCU free for developement, you get 100 CCU free for a year for first app, and can pay $100 for one year to get 200 CCU.
Photon Fusion does not seem to do persistent user data, would likely need to use different solution for things like levels, experience, or what items the player owns.
If you choose Unreal Engine (UE) that, you can use Epic Online Services EOS for voice chat, matchmaking, lobby systems, session management and other features. But can't use Photon Fusion with unreal engine, so for myself I would use AWS Gamelift if using UE.
For indie dev, first time deploying multiplayer game, possibly with less experiance I think using Unity and Photon Fusion is the way to go, Many services are free, you may only need to use external service for persistent player data and could possibly use EOS for voice chat (or exclude). But it might be harder to use EOS with unity.
I also didn't talk about unity's service because many say they perfer photon based on price and support, as well as the calculations are more complex, so I would just assume around same price as AWS GameLift.
