Photon Engine

Photon Engine provides multiplayer game networking, with Photon Realtime and related products sold on concurrent user capacity, monthly active users and traffic allowances, across regional hosting including Europe, Canada, the United States, Asia, South America, South Korea, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Pricing on concurrent users rather than on total players is the structure that fits multiplayer games and it protects a developer from their own success in the wrong way and the right way at once. A game with a million downloads and two hundred people playing at any moment costs very little, which is fair, and a viral spike hits the concurrency cap rather than the bank account, which is why the burst allowance matters.

Regional hosting is the technical requirement underneath the pricing, because multiplayer latency is governed by distance to the server, and a game whose players are in Seoul and whose servers are in Frankfurt is unplayable regardless of how good the netcode is.

Selling this as a service rather than a library is the decision that makes small studios able to ship multiplayer at all, since running authoritative game servers across regions is an operations discipline most small teams do not have and cannot afford to learn mid-project. Unity and Unreal integrations mean the networking arrives as a package rather than a porting exercise. Plans start at 95 dollars a month. Photon Engine offers a free tier for development before any concurrency commitment.