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I'm just getting my feet wet with multiplayer capabilities in Unity, and would like to have matchmaking and for now, just 1 v 1 matches. What I'm a bit confused about, is some people seem to be indicating they use both PlayFab and Photon together, some people use one or the other, etc.

PlayFab seems to be open to thousands of concurrent users, unless I'm misreading their documentation, whereas Photon is about $100/month for 100 CCUs. That seems strange that if they are that far apart that anyone would use Photon in the first place.

CCU, as I understand it - means the number of players that could be playing the game over the network at any given time. So if there is only allowance for 100 CCUs, that means 50 1v1 matches, correct? That seems a bit low to me.

Any thoughts or experience with these technologies that you wouldn't mind sharing would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

G

Ginzorf
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Photon and Playfab are (mostly) complementary, this is why they are used together in a lot of titles.

Photon: Focus on Realtime synchronous multiplayer Playfab: Focus on Backend features

Matchmaking is offered by both, so it depends on the features you need. If you need realtime gameplay (after the matchmaking), then you need something like Photon.

Both Photon have a free tier (for development), but usage based pricing in case of success. Usage in Photon is measured in CCU (players connected at the same time), Playfab usage is very fine-grained. Both products are very cost efficient -- if you leverage their features.

bertelmonster2k
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    Thank you! I appreciate your insight on the subject. It's unfortunate this question got closed before other people were able to give their input. But if there's anything StackOverflow is becoming very good at - it's closing topics so people don't learn anything. – Ginzorf Aug 27 '21 at 00:26
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    @Ginzorf Playfab is not in the same category of Photon, Mirror or unity's deprecated UNet, it provides very useful api's like authentication etc but you have to use your own host/client solution like photon or mirror, things like syncing player movements or sending RPCs are not handled by Playfab, they are complementary, and this question was not opinion based, its a technical issue, needed clarity, this has that, the other has those features, it's not opinions.... it seems they gave power to some people who don't often get to use them, so they eagerly use it to satisfy their feelings... – Alireza Jamali Dec 02 '22 at 04:58