I’m not sure what you mean. Photon makes money running game servers as a service. It wouldn’t surprise me if their business wasn’t viable selling software alone.
As far as I can tell, you can have Photon run the servers or you can license them to run yourself. Though they clearly prefer the former.
Either way, there's not much revenue coming in to most games by the time the developer wants to abandon them, and Photon's not getting paid much either. There's a lot of ways to make this work out monetarily.
It’s not that simple. Many of the newer products are designed cloud-first.
I’d love to see you rise to the challenge. If you think there’s an opportunity to make money here, “lots of ways to make this work,” perhaps take it up yourself.
Cloud first is fine as long as there's a fallback. Photon has a fallback.
Can you name something that's stuck on the cloud on a technical level and also couldn't be substituted with a mild dev effort?
Right now I don't think it's a good money making opportunity. Becoming one would need Photon or some other significant service provider completely refusing to license their software in a way that's compatible with this law, and assurance that they'll continue to refuse while I build my entire product around supplementing/replacing them.
