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philippenac avatar image
philippenac asked

Coming from GameSparks and GameLift to PlayFab

Hello everyone,

As you probably know, GameSparks just updated it's pricing policy, making us unable to continue to use their service. SO We are hoping to switch to PlayFab.

We are currently looking into the Matchmaking and Serverhosting possibilities. To give you an idea, we are currently working on a fast paced online game, imagine Unreal Tournament combined with Rocket League. (Matchmaking, customizations, parties, splitscreen, dedicated servers,...)

We want to use Linux servers from amazon. I see that we can do that via PlayFab, with auto-scaling for 10% extra on the original Amazon price. (Otherwise we would be using GameLift, but it's handier to do it directly via PlayFab)

My actual question: Which servers should we be looking for? I really cannot see the forest behind the trees. T3, m4, m5, c5, small, medium, large, the list goes on and on and on.

Kind regards,

Philippe

apisunrealpricingMatchmaking
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Andy avatar image
Andy answered

Actually, our legacy hosting service, which was built on AWS, does not support Linux VMs. The newer service, which we're calling Multiplayer Servers 2.0 is run in Azure and does. You can see a more detailed price and spec sheet here: https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-tournaments/multiplayer-servers-2.0/multiplayer-servers-detailed-price-sheet

For a game that is just onboarding to PlayFab, I would strongly recommend checking out the new service for hosting. Unlike the legacy service, it's where new feature development is going to be.

As to choosing an appropriate VM, that's going to be based on a large number of factors that generally come back to the performance characteristics of your game server. How many players per match? What's the CPU and memory utilization? And so on. The new service runs your server in a docker container, allowing many instances of it per VM. This gives you another lever to tune (how many instances per VM?).

The best way to find out is to push your sever to a VM and see how it behaves. That will give you a starting point. Then you use playtesting to fine tune.

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