[Sytten]

From a technological risk perspective I would never tie myself to a vendor like that. I know people do it all the time, but you are totally at the mercy of the vendor increasing price and having no choice but pay since you are so tightly integrated. Always add an interface is my moto.

[tyleo]

One of the troubles with games is that you don't know if your product will be successful up front. You can go down the route of building everything (engine, multiplayer server, game DB), but if you frontload the tech and your game isn't fun 5 years out, you're in a bad spot.

My experience has been that it's critical to frontload "fun discovery" which means taking concessions on 3rd-party technology. If you make something successful you earn the chance to replace 3rd parties with custom solutions. Often they're fine if your margins are high enough. If you fail, you won't be paying those monthly subscriptions long anyways.

[thrance]

I think the DB itself is open-source, and you can self-host if you want. Biggest risk is if the company goes under and stops maintaining it.

[gpm]

It's a BUSL license - you can self host so long as your application uses at most a single SpacetimeDB instance (i.e. no replication) and isn't a database service... or you are running a 5+ year old version of the server (and since this DB hasn't existed for 5+ years...).