Experience with Photon Engine?

[JordanL]

Hi everyone,

I'm part of a small team in the early stages of developing a multiplayer game, and I came across Photon Engine (https://www.photonengine.com).

Our initial plan was to write custom server logic with Node and socket.io, hosted on AWS or something similar -- and I still think that's a pretty solid option. But I can't deny that Photon's offering sounds attractive, especially considering we're not networking experts. So, I'm hoping to get some input to help make a decision.

If anyone around here has had experience using their platform, I would love to hear about it. General comments would be much appreciated :). As well, here are some specific questions off the top of my head:

• How good is their reliability/performance? Any issues there?
• Are there any areas in particular where it shines, or where it's not so great?
• What's the dev experience like? How does it compare to the process of writing your own networking logic?
• Is there enough flexibility to make the exact game you wanted to?
• How good is their customer support?
• Did you find their pricing reasonable?
• Are there any competing platforms to consider?
• Any tripping points/"gotchas" to be aware of?

Bottom line...would you recommend it?

Thanks in advance!

[BobF]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone here mention that they use Photon. I have the feeling only a minority of people here are doing multi-player, and most of those seem to have rolled their own solution.

I've looked at Photon with interest in the past and plan to take another look when I finally get around to adding multi-player capability. Photon seems pretty well established, and they run on Azure which should help with reliability and scalability. But Azure has also caused them a couple of bad outages which you can read about in their blog.

I would enjoy rolling my own solution, and it would likely save money on monthly fees, but Photon is tempting since their turnkey setup should be solid and would save development time.