Even if your game has found a strong and consistent audience, the number of players won’t be a constant or linear trend. It fluctuates over the course of days, weeks and months. With Multiplay, you don’t have to sit crunching the data to work out when you need capacity. Our system is built for gaming and we understand how to make sure a title has enough servers at any given time.
First, let’s define how the Multiplay cloud works in terms of what kind of machines the system utilises. Allocations are made with priority to machines in an always-ready-to-start state, resulting in very low wait times.
When planned capacity is exceeded, we burst into the cloud to bolster availability and make sure that players aren’t being rejected from joining a game or suffering long wait times, even if your active users are far exceeding your average. Cloud machines can be created and destroyed on-demand, so the system will quickly shut them down when the game session hosted in the cloud ends to keep costs down. We make sure you have enough resources in the right places to optimise player experience.
In this way, your game gets optimum performance without the need to pay for capacity that you don’t need.
It’s being able to keep your buffer size to a small number without worrying about what happens if this number is exceeded that makes Multiplay such a powerful tool in the arsenal of the best multiplayer studios in the world.
So how do we make sure the system knows if and when to burst into the cloud?
Source: Unity Technologies Blog