Licenses

The Photon Server requires a valid license to start. The Server SDK includes a trial license, which is valid for 30 days, so you don't have to do anything immediately.

Free License

Photon can be used free of charge for up to 100 concurrent connections (players that are connected at the same time). You can use the free license even in commercial games and you can have any number of monthly active users.

Get your free license here: http://www.exitgames.com/download/photon.

License Options

Once your project is growing past the 100 CCU limit of the free license, you can buy Photon licenses in our online shop. Smaller indie developers get a discount.

Existing licenses can be upgraded for the cost difference to the new one. Please contact us for that!

Using the License

Photon uses .license files, which are provided by Exit Games. New license files are simply copied into the folder where the Photon executables are. Other .license files should be removed.

PhotonControl and the Photon Server will read the files on start, so a new license currently requires a restart.

Floating Licenses

Photon's "Floating Licenses" are not bound to hardware or IP. They will run on any machine but need to contact our Floating License Monitor. On start, this HTTPs call must succeed. The following hourly contact has to succeed once every 24 hours. If the Monitor is not available for that long, Photon will shut down.

The License Monitor

A Photon does not start witout contacting the License Monitor, we made sure that our License Monitor is highly available. To achieve this, we use the Google App Engine service, which is available 24/7.