I was wondering if you can help me understand the design and costs involved in having matchmaking based game. Here's my requirements:
- Server build is hosted on Multiplayer
- Players are randomly matched and each game is max 6 players
- Games can last at most 10min for example.
- There are going to be multiple "rooms" (instances of matches) that should be created for each 6 matched players. (think of something like Smite)
First of all from what I understand when players are matched each "room" needs to be a server instance? I see that on the Free plan we are only allowed 12 servers on a region. That means I can have at most 72 players at any given time on all servers which doesn't seem ideal. Now lets consider the Pay as you Go plan. According to the Multiplayer Calculator even if I want to have 1000 players at peak time (which for a small game that could be becoming popular is realistic) and each server is 6 players that means I need about 167 concurrent server instances totalling at around $930/m cheapest. This calculator also doesn't seem to account for game times, before instance is destroyed. If these numbers are correct this price looks quite steep for an indie multiplayer game let alone if it had more players as the game grows.
Am I misunderstanding how this works and are there cheaper options to achieve what I want?
People hosting their own games on their machines (like in Among Us) is not an option.
