question

Hi,

>> Is Party lobby chats an option to create a Clan chat with a short (1-2 days) history?

Yes, PlayFab Party is well-suited to power voice and text communications for social experiences for your game and supports a wide variety of communication topologies. The “constrained to ‘teams’ or game-defined ‘channels’ “ topology is suitable for Clan chat. However, about the short (1-2 days) history functionality, one thing to note is that all chat or data messages are conceptually from one peer device or user directly to others, which means that PlayFab Party is only responsible for establishing “direct connections” peer to peer and won’t be able to automatically store chat history. You may need to store chat history in the client-side, then upload them to PlayFab Entity groups(Short or long term chat channels can be defined as an entity group.) or your own custom servers and find a way to manage them.

>> Pros/cons vs Photon Chat?

PlayFab Party is currently in private preview, for now, it has the following features:

• Encryption and authentication. Party authenticates player devices using their PlayFab player identity and encrypts data with a DTLS-like protocol.
• Device to device datagram networking. At the core of Party are relays that are hosted globally across the Azure cloud. Player devices use these relays to create Party networks and send game data to one another. The Party networking system includes configurable transport features such as automatic retries when encountering packet loss.
• Voice and text chat. Player devices can bind audio devices to Party networks to accomplish real-time voice chat. Text chat messages between players are also supported.
• Speech-to-text and voice synthesis. Party can transcribe player voice chat and synthesize utterances for text message. This functionality has several uses, but was primarily designed as an accessibility aide.
• Real-time translation. Party can understand and synthesize real-time translations of player voice and text chat.

Regarding to Pros/Cons vs Photon, you may need to check both PlayFab Party and Photon documentation to assess which service suits your game best.