I’m still researching Nakama, but wanted to verify an assumption: unless using Nakama Enterprise, there’s no way to scale matches across multiple servers (virtual or otherwise) - they’ll all run on the base Nakama instance? If that’s the case, it feels like the open source version of Nakama is only really useful for games where the server implementation is mostly deferred to a headless server (as opposed to being all in the runtime framework). Is that correct?
Not necesserly, you can still scale just depends:
- for horizontal scaling you would need to do some bit of work, which comes to end pretty much how it is handled in Enterprise licence
- for vertical scaling well that is available from start, just yeah, a bit of stress testing and what not…
Now there is option for horizontal scaling to be done on easy way but it depends well a lot of on some other social aspects such as:
- How important to you is that, if you are having friend/party system to be able to play on any instances and connect to single match, or not.
- If it is not important deploying own loadbalancer, api gateway and multiple nakama instances can work, and it does work, but all of these needs to be handled on your own side.
- If it is important highly to have freidns being on two different servers still able to connect to same match, it is tricky, and requires a little bit more work, at least from my experiance just when you come down to that part you then need to worry should your team do it, or cost of licences + hosting is affordable.
- My advice usually is, worry about scalability if your game reaches hights when vertical scalling with dedicated server can’t hold it. Then think about moving to Nakama heroic labs hosting support. from what i have read, they make sure your players do not notice issue when switching to their cloud solutions but may require your additional input from backing data.