512 bytes x 100 users = 50Kb/s

50Kb * 60 * 60 * 24 = 4320000 Kb in one day, which means 4.12 GB day

100Gb / 4.12 = 24.27

“If you write a game that works for two players, it will scale to millions of online players without any additional work.”

Me too I don’t want to knock your service and do think it’s got some remarkable features.
Frankly, I also think that this not an argument but a sales pitch.

I’d love to see examples of these scalable-in-the-millions games. Any links?
We all know that scalability doesn’t happen auto-magically. It requires well designed code, well thought server architecture and finely tuned setups. Most of the very large MMOs we have seen built with SmartFoxServer went through multiple optimization and redesign phases as their traffic was growing by orders of magnitude.

I won’t comment on the other things because it’s quite clear that we are comparing apples with tomatoes.

Cheers

I’m Oliver from Player.IO. To really balance it out, you should do an interview with us also

Also, i’d like to address a few points:

“Just rent a VPS” — Well, yes, that’s an option, but then you’re also doing operations and playing system administrator. You’ll also need to pay for bandwidth usage, which is ignored above.

“You have no control over the server settings, persistence, security, threading, resource monitoring etc” — That’s the whole point! You don’t need to think about server settings, security and threading, because it’s already handled for you. You’ll never need to boot another server or anything; we’ll handle all the loading for you.

You don’t need to think about how to handle load, because *true* (not just bigger-box=bigger-performance) scalability is builtin without having to do anything special as a developer.

If you write a game that works for two players, it will scale to millions of online players without any additional work.

I think that’s a really good value proposition for indie developers: Just focus on the gameplay.

“Having to run server side code concurrently with anybody else’s code seems another major annoyance to me.”

Think of Player.IO as a VPS for multiplayer games. Yes, other code might be running on the same physical machines, but we’ve ensured that it’s sandboxed away from you, so you’ll never even notice.

It shouldn’t matter anyway, because with Player.IO you don’t have to think in units of machines. You don’t know (or care) if your game runs on a single or multiple machines across the cluster. It’s all handled by us.

That plus: we’ve never had a single complaint about it.

With regards to the pricing: I think we have a very generous free plan, and i think that the above analysis leaves out a lot of issues: bandwidth fees, time spent administrating servers that could be spent developing games, architecting to scale over multiple machines etc… If you factor in everything, i think we’re very competitive.

In the end, it shouldn’t come down to only price — it should be a combination of ease of use, ease of deployment, ease of operations, price and required featureset.

“SmartFox license is a one time fee, never expires and you run your own dedicated server”

But you’ll still have to pay for the resources (bandwidth) used by the server and the server itself.

It’s exactly like Player.IO, except we don’t have the one-time fee

Now, i don’t want to knock Smartfox, because i think it’s a very impressive piece of software.

Player.IO is not a boxed piece of software though, it’s a service designed to make it easier-than-dirt to build games and get them running without having to think about all the hard stuff.

Just build your game, deploy, and don’t think about it.

- Oliver, Player.IO

Could stay here hours to explain all the good things coming with Smartfox, but I think that the showcase speaks better than any kind of word.

If you need a professional software to start developing a serious business plan, than 2400 euros are nothing.

Really nothing.

i’ll take that numbers into consideration.

Still it seems to be more for mid-sized teams to big ones with some (at least minimal) budget.

Most flash games generates under $200 a month with ads, of course with multiplayer you can make a lot more. I will definitely try with something multiplayer this year.

thanks.

If you want to start easy and be able to grow as your game grows you can spend much less money. You can start with a VPS plan or a cloud based hosting (e.g. Rackspace) and spend between 10-50$/month which is definitely affordable. And you still get a root-access machine where you can install anything else, if you need it.

Personally I like the Player.IO idea but I also find it lacking of many important aspects. You have no control over the server settings, persistence, security, threading, resource monitoring etc… Having to run server side code concurrently with anybody else’s code seems another major annoyance to me.

I have seen the plan that you mention. $99 bucks for 100GB/month of data transfer or a maximum of 5K users. You should pay attention to these numbers because they say quite a lot.
Suppose you are running an average of 100 users every day in your game. And suppose each play uses very little bandwidth, almost unreal: 512bytes/s incoming and outgoing.

512 bytes x 100 users = 51.2Kb/s
51.2Kb * 60 * 60 * 24 = 4423680 Kb in one day, which means 4.4 GB day

Hmmm… 100Gb / 4.4 = 22.72
You won’t even make it to the end of the month
And those are 100 concurrent users
consuming a ridiculously low amount of bandwidth.

I don’t want to be the party pooper here, but what we propose is definitely different from that. A SmartFox license is a one time fee, never expires and you run your own dedicated server, configured as you wish and using all resource available in your hosting.

A hosted solution have been asked by the community for ages, the only solution out there is shockwaveserver.com that costs $80 a month + $299 setup fee + the license of the server. is that an indie price?

please take a look at playerio.com and compare, they have a basic plan for free that supports 500 concurrent users and you pay $100 for $5000 users, that sounds indie for me.

I’m sorry to say this here, but i really love SmartFoxServer and i made several demos with it, but it’s simply not affordable for my budget and the size of my games.