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Rename jam or change judging criteria?

A topic by mikeful created Jul 28, 2022 Views: 373 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 4
(1 edit) (+2)(-1)

Current judging criteria focuses very heavily on using Photon that I feel like it's practically impossible to win any prizes without using it.

Please consider changing name of the jam to "Photon Exclusive Multiplayer Game Jam" to reflect nature of sponsorship or change judging criteria to be more fair to other technologies and people that are unable to learn/use Photon.

Host(+1)(-2)

Thanks for the feedback, we will be posting some new updates about the criteria soon. The jam is sponsored by and focused on Photon though so they would like to encourage as many people to try and use their product as possible.

(+2)

Maybe adding separate queue for non-Photon users? Because the clock is ticking and there are still no new updated regarding the new criteria :)

Submitted

As someone who'd be using photon regardless, I feel like the messaging here really comes across as if Photon doesn't have a lot of confidence in their product. Which is weird, because in my opinion they have the best offering at least for unity.

(+2)

You cannot self-host Photon, so you’re basically locked-in with the vendor. While this may not be a big issue now, I do remember the story of Game Spy Arcade. It was well established network solution for games, but it got purchased by 3rd party some years ago and the new owners requested tens of thousand dollars monthly upkeep from existing games (most of them pretty old) or they will shutdown the servers. Actually that’s the reason you cannot play online multiplayer with many old games from GOG catalogue, unless you use VPN and the developers actually allowed LAN plays.

This is why we here stick to Nakama service. It is not as advanced as PUN (although their match-making is somewhat near), but its Open-Source Software (meaning you can always patch yourself if some feature is missing) and you can host it on your own infrastructure (or you can pay for the hosting in the cloud by Nakama, which is basically what Photon is offering).

(+2)(-1)

bru the jam is made in partnership with photon what do u expect