Some reasons I didn’t go with Neutron are that I don’t think it would give me enough control over the features of my game and the fact that the server (Photon) is C++ and C#. Cost was another factor.

To explain a bit more, the games I’m making are not typical Flash games to which I want to just tack on a lobby and leaderboards. (In fact, those are features that I don’t need at all.) I consider it critical to be able to control every aspect of my game in order to maximize the quality of the player experience. I really don’t like giving away that control or feeling that I might lose it in the future if policies change.

Photon is the actual server software, and it’s licensed separately (though you can obviously use them together). I am done with C++ (did that for many years), so that was a turn-off. I don’t mind C# as much, but I knew I wanted to use my server code for more than just Unity projects, so I was hoping to find a Java solution for better code sharing between games.

My initial misgivings with Darkstar were overcome pretty quickly, and now I’m using it 100%, and I think it’s great. It does have missing features (a couple big, quite a few small), but the dev team is responsive to community requests, so I feel like the gaps will get filled in enough over time. Meanwhile, I’m designing around the known limitations and planning to utilize new features as they arrive.

Hope that’s helpful!