edit: looks like i had the wrong understanding, thanks to the comments below for explaining
~~~~~helps that Apple's SoC has the RAM on the main die itself. They're probably immune from these price hikes, but a lot of the PC/Windows vendors would, which would only make Apple's position even stronger~~~~
I’d certainly prefer to use an app rather than having to hunt for quarters. If the app didn’t exist, I’d probably have to go to a bank to get quarters or an ATM to withdraw cash and beg the closest convenience store to give me change.
Granted, there are probably better solutions that require neither quarters nor a mobile app, but between those two, the mobile app wins for me.
We're using Depot at Hathora, and it's enabled us to focus on our platform development instead of worrying about CI/build pipelines. We're very happy with the speed improvements we're noticing.
I'm not too familiar with Steam Networking, but at a glance here are some differences:
- Steam Networking seems mostly for peer-to-peer messaging, so it's closer to a STUN server (used by WebRTC for sending UDP datagrams). It's excellent for sending messages over high-quality links, but if you want to run server side logic, it doesn't seem like Steam Networking will help much.
- On the flip side Hathora is a server-authoritative framework, which can run arbitrary game code on our infrastructure. This is closer to a cloud provider. The difference between us and just using AWS or DO is that we're providing the "Steam Networking"-like edge network out of the box and tailoring our use case to the needs of game devs.
- Lastly, we can actually spin up compute infra at the edge if enough of your users are originating from a location far from the rest of your servers. Let's say your game starts to go popular in Asia today, our routing layer is smart enough to launch a server in Singapore instead of connecting users to far away game servers.
Hathora Cloud is still very young and iterating quickly. We've been in a private beta with select design partners and we're onboarding users slowly via signups.
When we make it generally available, we will definitely make pricing front and center!
~~~~~helps that Apple's SoC has the RAM on the main die itself. They're probably immune from these price hikes, but a lot of the PC/Windows vendors would, which would only make Apple's position even stronger~~~~