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I am wondering if there's any place i can go where i can either run my own code that does matchmaking or offers hosted matchmaking for games (I.E. RTS games) for free. Is there?

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pardon my ignorance, but what is a "game matchmaking service"? Is it like eHarmony for avatars? – warren Jul 28 '10 at 18:40
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@warren: it's like where you go fire up your favorite RTS game and click "Join Game" in the multiplayer section, and it presents you with a list of people hosting games. Generally that's done by the host computers sending a message to a central server that says "i'm hosting a game at this ip address", and joining games asking the server for what the avilable games are. – RCIX Jul 28 '10 at 19:12

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Google App Engine is free up to a certain reasonably-hefty level. Past that level, it's still quite affordable. If you exceed that level, you either desperately need to optimize your code, or you can probably make enough off donations/ads to support the servers.

Matchmaking is extremely cheap in both CPU and RAM, so as long as you're not doing any game logic on the server, an introductory cloud-based system should provide far more horsepower than you actually need.

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