question

The short answer is no, there is no direct feature called challenges or messages in PlayFab. However there are ways to do this within the PlayFab Platform.

Messaging:
One comparison that you might say between GameSparks and Playfab is that GameSparks has a persistent connection to a game client. While Playfab is a series of light weight API calls. For persistent connections to a game client in PlayFab you would use the Custom Game Server and upload it to PlayFab. Once you have this in place then you can send messages to connected clients and syndicate a message to all players that are online that the game servers are coming down for maintenance. This also opens the doors for Weekly and Global messaging. From a custom Game Server you can leverage pub-sub subscriptions to Events in PlayStream which is far more powerful and way less configuration than having to engineer this system on top of Game Sparks. Our game server out of the box comes with Chat, and messaging built into it for an easy way to communication messaging down to clients. This means that any event that happens in PlayStream you can now push to connect clients and with even more power you can have custom logic to determine the context of those messages.


Challenges:
Challenges are a bit more tricky, although this has been done successfully on PlayFab. You can use Shared Group data keys to keep track of games, but you need to keep the amount of data fairly small. If you also pair that with a Custom Game Server & Push Notifications you can easily create a challenge system within PlayFab. While making this part of our feature set is planned, we don't have a timeline for when this will be an emeded feature of our API's but for now you can leverage our existing tech and api's to achieve what you want to do.