title: Hosting Box2D MMO: Photon vs Lidgren vs GameSparks vs PlayFab
body: <p>I'm developing a game written in C# which utilizes a custom Box2D/Farseer implementation and is multiplayer based on the low-level Lidgren library. It has a few requirements: 
  - Box2D must run on the server, along with other custom game logic.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>The server will be authoritative.</li>
  <li>Game is real-time, not turn-based.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I'm okay rewriting the networking to use a more premium platform, but I need help understanding which route to take. I could simply host my existing Lidgren-based server as a Windows Service on an AWS EC2 instance. This is actually what I'm currently doing. However, I've heard that going with a service like Photon will be much more performant. PlayFab and GameSparks may also provide this networking ability, but it seems they're mostly about account management, not transferring game object data.</p>
  
  <p>Ideally, PlayFab or GameSparks would allow me to do everything -- run my custom C# server exe, integrate with their account API, and prove me a very performant networking library to use in place of Lidgren. I've found it difficult to determine if they do. It's a bit spotty.</p>
  
  <p>Which is the best platform to host an MMO as I described?</p>