Credit cost & pricing

Find out what it would cost to run your multiplayer game using coherence.

How does it work?

First, you pick your pricing tier here. If any costs are incurred here, they're minor and predictable.

Then you decide on your Hosting Options which is only going to impact your bottom line once your game is generating significant traffic or income.

coherence does not lock you into any of the available hosting options.

You're free to switch over to another option at any point.

You can even mix and match them, per platform. Use the coherence Cloud for navigating the complexities of the Playstation 5 for example, while still running your game on Client-Hosting on PC.

Client-Hosting and Self-Hosting options are covered by 3% game revenue share.

When you decide to use the coherence Cloud, you will run into the concept of credits, explained below.

Why credits?

In short — credits are the best way utilize compute resources efficiently in order to minimize wasteful spend. They also give you a lot of flexibility to deal with short-term spikes in user numbers, incurring only one-time costs. And, of course, they they make it real easy to keep track of costs via our Dashboard.

Some basic facts:

• coherence Cloud is unlocked immediately after account creation, and the included credits can be used right away. The exact amount of included credits depends on the tier.

• Credits are only consumed when you use the coherence Cloud resources — you only pay for what you use. Other hosting options never incur credit costs.

• Additional credits can be purchased at any time, at any amount, in 1K credit increments.

• Pre-purchasing a lot of credits means significant (up to 60%) cuts in credit costs — something to keep in mind.

Credits explained

Credits are coherence’s virtual unit of cost that can be converted into resources. Use the table below to understand exactly what costs a certain amount of credits:

Resource	Cost
CCU Hour	1 credit / CCU Hour
Small Simulator	20 credits / Server Hour
Medium Simulator	40 credits / Server Hour
Large Simulator	80 credits / Server Hour
X-Large Simulator	160 credits / Server Hour
Bandwidth	200 credits / 1GB
KV Database	5 credits / 100MB / Hour
Storage	0,07 credits per GB / Hour

Detailed explanations of these terms are available in our Glossary.

Credit Costs

CREDIT AMOUNT PURCHASED	COST IN USD
1,000 to 100,000 credits	$1.60 per 1000 credits
101,000 to 250,000 credits	$1.30 per 1000 credits
251,000 to 500,000 credits	$1.15 per 1000 credits
501,000 or more credits	$0.99 per 1000 credits

Calculating credit usage

Rooms

The credit usage for a game session (sessionCreditCost) in a Room-based game is calculated easily as follows:

sessionCreditCost = 
    (roomSize * sessionLength / 60 * 1 credit) + (sessionBandwidthGB * 200 credits)

Where:

• sessionLength = the average duration of a game session in minutes

• roomSize = the maximum number of players that can join a room per game session. Example: for a game that can have up to 20 players per room, roomSize is 20.

• sessionBandwidthGB = total outbound bandwidth in GB

And:

• (roomSize * sessionLength / 60 * 1 credit) equals the credit costs for the CCU hours per session

• (sessionBandwidthGB * 200 credits) equals the credit cost for the consumed bandwidth per session

For the purposes of our bandwidth/storage calculations, 1 GB equals 1000MB, not 1024MB.

Example

Sessions per month = 50,000

Max players per session = 12

Average length of a session = 2 minutes

Outbound bandwidth per session = 60 MB (or 0.060 GB)

sessionCreditCost = 
    ((12 * 2 / 60 * 1 credit) + (0.060 * 200 credits)) * 50,000 =
    140,000 credits

50K sessions would cost approximately 140K credits.

Worlds

It's equally simple to calculate the cost for a persistent world (worldCreditCost) that is online 24/7:

worldCost_perWorld = 
  (worldSize × 24 × 30 × 1 credit) + (averageHourlyTrafficGB × 24 × 30 × 200 credits)

totalWorldCost = worldCost_perWorld × numberOfWorlds

Where:

• worldSize = the maximum number of players that the world can host

• averageHourlyTrafficGB = the average outbound bandwidth consumed hourly by the world

And:

• (worldSize * 24 * 30 * 1 credit) equals the credit cost for the CCU hours for the world per month

• (averageHourlyTraffic * 24 * 30 * 200 credits) equals the credit cost for the monthly bandwidth consumption per world

Example

Number of worlds online = 3 (24/7, eg. one per region: NA, EU, Asia)

Max players per the world = 250

Average outbound bandwidth per hour = 95 MB

worldCost_perWorld = 
  (250 × 24 × 30 × 1 credit) + ((0.095 × 24 × 30) × 200 credits) =
  180,000 credits + 13,680 credits =
  193,680 credits

totalWorldCost
  = 193,680 credits × 3
  = 581,040 credits
  

Hosting three worlds for up to 250 players would cost approximately 581K credits.

Simulators

Simulators generate credit cost only if they are running.

To calculate the monthly costs for simulators you only need to know what type of simulator (eg. small or medium) you might be using and for how long each simulator instance will be online per month. With this information simulator credit costs per session (sessionSimCost) can be calculated using the following formula:

totalSimCost = 
    (timeOnlinePerInstance / 60) * (simInstanceCost * simUtilisationPerSession)

Example

A competitive FPS could utilize simulators to prevent cheating. For that purpose the game could start one small simulator for every room (or per session) which contains key game data and is used to verify the data sent by the clients. In that case, each simulator instance would be online for the duration of a session, for example 15 minutes.

Example

simUtilisationPerSession = 0.5 (one instance for 2 concurrent sessions)

timeOnlinePerInstance = 15 (MaxSessionLength of Room example above)

simInstanceCost = 40 (medium sim)

sessionSimCost = 
   (15 / 60) * (40 credits * 0.5) = 
   0.25 * 20 credits = 
   5 credits (per session)

Simulator support per session would cost approximately 5 credits.

Running out of credits

If your credits run low (under 1000 credits), you will get a warning email. When the balance drops below 0, you get another reminder in an email. If it is not acted upon, the game will go offline.

A good way to avoid this happening is to enable auto-purchasing credits.

Auto-purchasing credits

You can set up auto-purchasing credits in the Dashboard.

You do this by defining the value for minimum amount of credits remaining and the amount of credits purchased at each auto-purchase. Whenever the minimum amount is reached, a new purchase will be made to top up your credit balance.

Billing

For now, you will receive a monthly subscription bill. Annual subscriptions will be added in the near future.

Credit purchases will come with a separate invoice upon purchasing, including auto-purchases.

Revenue sharing

When your game starts earning direct revenu, you will need to report revenue for every royalty product on a quarterly basis by sending us an email at [email protected]. Based on the data you submitted, we will invoice you for our 3% share of the revenue, if your game makes more than $15,000, but limited only to any revenues above the $15,000. Starting from revenues of $5,000,000 per quarter we suggest you approach us for a custom deal.

Limits and caveats

• Individual Rooms are limited to 100 CCUs. This limit only applies to non-Enterprise tiers.

• Individual Worlds are limited to 1000 CCUs. This limit only applies to non-Enterprise tiers.

• Enterprise customers can request custom sizes and limits for both Rooms and Worlds.

• Costs per session or World will increase if additional features such as Simulators, Storage or Lobbies are utilized.