question

PlayFab does not provide an out-of-the-box tournament system yet, though we do plan on adding more tournament support as soon as we can. Based on your tournament scenario, we recommend having your own Custom Server or using Cloud Script. But it all comes down to who will have the authority on your title. That is, who gets to decide the control of logic for managing each tournament session. If you're okay with clients being authoritative, Photon is fine. In that case, you'd just use Cloud Script to return information on which players are matched and trust the client.

**Cloud Script or Custom Game Server Hosting - One way or another, you'll need to have server authority over the results of matches between players, so you'll want to use one of these to accomplish that. **

• Shared Group Data - Since your tournaments are for a small number of players (8), this could be a way to track the status/scores of each player.
• In-app purchasing - We have multiple systems for purchasing items from your in-game catalog, both receipt validation, and more cart-like sales. You could create consumable items which are used as the entry "token" to a tournament, if you want to limit the number of times a player can join one, or help prevent players abandoning tournament sessions.

Please take a look at Game Server documentation here: https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-tournaments/custom-game-servers.

In addition, we've also more recently created a basic server project in Unity that developers can use as the basis for creating their own dedicated servers - you can find that project here: https://github.com/PlayFab/PlayFabGameServer