Regions

Photon Cloud provides you with global connectivity to allow low latency gaming all around the world. This is done by hosting servers in various regions.

As the available regions may change over the lifetime of a project, clients get the current list of regions from our Photon Name Servers.

Each region is completely separate from the others and consists of a Backend Server and Frontend Servers.

The list of available regions differs per product (Fusion, Quantum, Chat etc.). With the Region Allowlist, you can define which regions should be available per AppId (see below).

Below is the list of regions for this product.

Available Regions

The Photon Cloud consists of servers in several regions, distributed across multiple hosting centers over the world. Some regional servers only support specific products and client SDKs. This means for example that Fusion clients can use the region Japan but Chat can not.

Each Photon Cloud region is identified by a "region token", which is a case insensitive, short string. For example, "EU" or "eu" are both accepted and refer to the same Europe region.

Set the region before calling "Connect":

C#

chatClient = new ChatClient(this);
chatClient.ChatRegion = regionToken;
chatClient.Connect(chatAppId, chatAppVersion, new AuthenticationValues(userID));

List of available regions and tokens:

Region Allowlist

There are several reasons why you should consider limiting the regions available to your players and users (see below). The Region Allowlist enables you to customize the available regions per application directly from the dashboard - without client side changes.

Open the dashboard, click "Manage" for a chosen application and then click "Edit Allowlist". You will find an input field where you can enter the list of allowed regions as follows:

• the available regions are defined above per SDK and sometimes separately for the Industries Circle.
• the allowlist must be a string of region tokens separated by semicolons. e.g. "eu;us".
• region tokens are case insensitive.
• undefined or unrecognized region tokens will be ignored from the list.
• empty ("") or malformed string (e.g. ";;;") means all available regions are allowed.

Within 10 minutes of a change (confirm and save), the Name Servers will send the filtered list to connecting clients. To avoid conflicts on the client side, connect to the "Best Region" by ping or make sure to pick a region received with the regions list.

How To Choose A Region

Users in the US have the lowest latency if connected to the Photon Cloud US region. Easy.

But what if you have users from all over the world?

You can

• a) let the game client ping the different Photon Cloud regions and pre-select the one with the best ping, read our how-to
• b) distribute client builds tied to a region, so users from different regions connect to different Photon Cloud regions or
• c) let the user choose a matching region from within your game`s UI.

Alternatively, you can d) let all users connect to the same region if the higher latency is acceptable for your gameplay, e.g. with any "not-so-realtime" games.

All Photon Cloud apps are working in all available regions without any extra charge. See pricing.

Photon Cloud's dashboard lets you monitor the usage of your game in each region and easily upgrade or downgrade your subscription plan. Go to your dashboard.