Hi all, I'm currently employed in a Videogame Software House and in my stagiaire time I was asked to replace RakNet in our back-end because it was very limited and so I did. Now we have this custom made services that works smoothly and passed the dayone of our last game.
But yesterday my boss came to me and asked me to find some company that can develop all the remaining features of the server on commission, because my lead valued all the remaining work TBD in 3 years, but it must be up in 1 year. IMHO it's better to continue this way and that my lead made some exaggerating estimates.
So I'm asking you what's your opinion? How can I convince my boss that is our interest to develop it inside? Do you think that it's better to rent some services (eg Photon)? Do you have some advice regarding the name of companies that rents or develops services on demand?
Some bosses can be convinced, others cannot. The best way to convince someone in my opinion is to always be predictable and honest, and let them come to the right conclusion based on all available facts.
Now, if the lead has an estimate of 3 man-years, and you have a shorter estimate, have you asked your lead why the estimate is the way it is? Do you find that, when you estimte things, you often finish them before the time you estimated, so you know for a fact that your own estimates are trustworthy?
Separately: If your goal is to build a game, then the more you can get from open source or leasing/purchasing, the better, as long as it'a a good fit for the game. If you already have something "better than RakNet" for your game, then I'm not sure Photon is the best other option -- you could look at services like Parse, or PlayFab, or Gamedonia, for comparison. Building everything from scratch is not the right thing to do, unless you are both very well funded, and you have already built several previous games, so that you know why you need to do it, and how to do it right.
The services I made aren't "better than" RakNet are only more flexible because they asked me to project them keeping in mind that we should migrate even the consoles to our services to avoid PSN/Live restriction on accesses and/or lines in Leaderboards. My services offer Matchmaking, Leaderboards and TUS.
I agree with the statement "don't reinvent the wheel" but it all started as a Stage project to see my capacities and when I finished it they found it more usable and tried to use it for our last game and it went good so our designer started to consider the idea of using more Server-side features like clans and so on.
For my lead estimate I can tell you that it was made 2 years ago, when the team was composed only with 2 people who never worked serverside, now there are four of us, but the lead resign 2 weeks ago and the new lead hasn't made his own estimate considering the new people.
Thanks in advance
EDIT:Ah I forgot to mention that we are a medium sized company that releases like 4 AA games per year so the service doesn't have to be game based.
