P2P or Dedicated Servers? What's the best for your unity game?

Answering a question from this weeks student call about peer to peer vs dedicated server game setups. Which type should you use for your unity game and why? There's actually an answer for everyone, depending on your game type, so watch and let me know what you think :)

[EpicTyphlosionTV]

Peer to peer benefits from not needing any server upkeep, which also means you can play the game online far into the future. Only issues are connection and security.

[princetruth]

I was just this week starting to learn about this and wanting to have online for my turn based games.. yiu couldn't have chosen a better topicman, great thanks!

[roflcopterpilot]

Would love to see a breakdown of CCU calculations and how to go about cost calculations, maybe use a common platform such as Photon as an example? Outside of the scope of coding but it seems to be a factor that scares many developers.

[ktorn]

6:06 thanks for adding this at the end. True p2p in video gaming is very challenging, especially if you want to keep persistent game state in an MMORPG. But it’s a worthwhile challenge if you want a long lasting world that does not depend on any one server staying up. As for trust on a wider scale, we can look into decentralised consensus mechanisms. The video game space is very hostile towards blockchains, but there is merit to the tech.

[fmproductions]

For games where there is no competitive aspect and when there are mostly just 2 players in a session, P2P seems like a nice and simpler solution for sure.
Epic and Steam offer those relay services for a p2p like network structure too, so you don't have to worry about connecting the peers on your own (which can be be a real hassle, can expose insecurities when peers setup to support directly connecting to others and a lot of times, you end up needing a separate server to relay packages between the peers or to connect them together either way).

[alec_almartson]

I would say: "It depends on the game".

[atilliator]

Love the hoodie infront of the tropical background!

[Mtylgd]

You also should factor in that simply debugging peer to peer can be much harder so finding and fixing P2P issues can take much more time.

[alienJIZ]

Best way imo is a public server as a p2p client session broker.

If it's competitive or hacking becomes a problem, train LLMs to analyze matches and memory states to look for anomalies, use UBA to auto flag suspicious users, efficiently collect telemetry on first launch for more reliable banning purposes (cpu/disk/mobo serial, public IP, MAC Address, etc.), and also anti-cheat post-gameplay telemetry to feed the LLM, with ML jobs to account for intentional disconnects vs latency

But most ideally, we need decentralized P2P gaming. The gaming community in general is large enough at this point that to avoid putting server costs on small teams/devs, everyone can just spin up (i.e.) a Raspberry Pi node and share the burden. Decentralized, open source governance, anti-cheat rules, scalable, etc.

[PeterMilko]

FYI: The save your spot button for multiplayer is broken on the site.

[tetryds]

I would like to add that maintenance is the biggest cost of dedicated servers, since hosting is not prohibitively expensive anymore. Most indie games can get away with lowest tier hosting.

[Casualflth]

I dont like dedicated servers only. I think peer to peer is best for quickplay with the ability for players to create and host their own servers and those servers being listed in a server browser in-game. I think this would be the best process for bringing a battlefield type of game to the linux and foss crowd. Foss crowd doesnt really like dedicated servers and i dont have the cash or infrastructure to have dedicated servers for more than 10-20 people. I think having a votekick option and giving server owners the ability to permanently ban players is the best way to combat cheaters, abk cant even make an effective anticheat so theres no way i can make one, best to keep that tool in the hands of the players

[JonathanbmillerZIG]

I'm curious of any security risks to the players peer-to-peer networking can open up and how to prevent them. I can't think of any, but the thought of someone directly connecting to another computer does make me wonder if there are any concerns I should prepare for.

[personhurter]

I’m trying to decide between relay and dedicated servers for my vr social streaming app and need help deciding. Any suggestions?

[dviross]

Yo I got a question, I'm making a multiplayer game that runs even if only one player is connected like minecraft world, but i want the host to move between the players depends on who connected first. Is that possible?

[Casualflth]

Imo community self moderation is my favorite option and usually very effective. Using a votekick and rejoin timeout or an automated block option to prevent being matched with the same player again by removing them from the match pool for players from the previous game theyd been ejected from

This is my very unprofessional opinion, please tell me where im going wrong or if this is much harder than server client moderation

[goog]

any reccomendations for adding peer to peer into my games? like where i should look

[alfonsoesteves]

What engines or programming languages are good for games that need multiplayer??

[TarrenHassman]

And folks, when he says getting p2p clients to agree on stuff is possible but it’s complicated. He means graduate level distributed systems level difficult, it’s the same fundamental problem cryptocurrency networks are trying to solve.

[paddyh]

So a “versus fighting” game will always be run on p2p architecture, is that right?