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Photon: How is CCU calculated?
So I'm thinking about switching my game over to use Photon. I've been advised multiple times to do so, and it seems a lot more reliable than Unity. It also professes to have no punch through issues and since we are developing for a college dorm audience, this is a huge bonus.
I just have one question: How is CCU calculated? For example, does 20 CCUs mean that 20 people can be in a single "match"/instance of the game, with multiple instances running? Or does it mean that the total number of people playing my game at the same time, despite being in separate "instances"/matches/lobbies, cannot exceed 20?
Answer by Dreamora · Jun 22, 2014 at 10:36 PM
20 CCU means 20 concurrent users ie 20 users on the game at the same time.
For many games, the Photon Unity Networking Indie license available on the asset store, that offers 100 CCU, is enough to get quite far as 100 CCU, thats up to several thousand distinct players every day depending on how balanced the player schedule is. In case where you exceed that, ExitGames also offers 500CCU and 1000 CCU indie licenses on their store at a very low price (keep in mind that game servers themself cost $50-$150 a month if you were to host games yourself), allowing you to easily grow if required.
Ok, first off thank you! That was really clear! I have one other quick question. How long are players considered using the Photon Networks? Do they operate like the Unity $$anonymous$$aster Server, where the servers are like a lobby list, and once the players join a game, they disconnect from the server and connect directly to the game host?
Again, thank you!
No In case of Photon, the Photon Server is always part of the communication, its much more than just a game listing service. In fact, clients will never talk to each other directly in Photon, they always talk to the server which relays the information to the desired target (a player, the master client, the whole room or nowhere in case of property changes and webhooks). The master client in Photons networking is just a special client (the one creating the room normally) that has additional authority over the game when compared to regular users.
This setup has 2 major benefits: It
It removes the need and troubles involved with NAT punchthrough and it failing, especially on mobile where punchthrough is either not needed or technically impossible as the firewall sits in your mobile operators site
If you write your handling correctly with session persistant data store on player and the room object through properties(which is then stored on the photon server), having a master leave is no problem at all as a new master is assigned who can just take over the duty. With Unity Networking, if the master leaves, the round is over as he also was the server.
Whats with turnbased games? Let´s say I have currently 10 "running" games (1on1) and only 3 of them are active playing (User logged on into the game). The other 7 games are persisted in the clound and the user aren´t active at the moment. Do I have 20 or 6 CCUs?
"Concurrent users only count anyone who's connected at some time. Being inactive in some game does not count, so Turnbased game might have lower CCU counts, if you disconnect players until they get a turn notice via push notification."
The reply to my question. I recieved it here: http://forum.exitgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5017
Hello Dreamora but we work for game like 8 ball mechansim as challenge and player game in case the game like it have hundreds thousands of players play at the same time this can be huge budge if the 1000 user with 150$ or I have misunderstood something you can explain it for me pls.