question

The rate limits are in place to ensure that no one title can impact others, and to keep our pricing as low as possible (the more it costs to run, the more we'd have to charge). We can increase call rate limits based upon a custom contract, but let's first take a step back.

In general, it's best to start with a top-down approach, so that we can work from your actual game requirements to determine the best (efficiency + least cost) solution for you. For example, here are a couple of models for some of the games we support that update the player data most often:

Casual clickers: These games update player data at an extremely high rate, but do so almost entirely on the client, with periodic updates to the service (every couple of minutes, with an extra "push" of data when the client device notifies them of an impending close operation, and providing the player with a button to do a manual save to the cloud in a preferences menu).

Twitch-style action/multiplayer: Since these games require a high level of interaction with the players and their data, and need very low latency, they use custom game servers (https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-tournaments/custom-game-servers and https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/external-game-servers). When the player joins the session, the server reads the relevant info for the player and the updates it over the course of the session locally - again, updating the backend data every couple of minutes (and when the session ends for the player).

Now, there are always going to be new and different games, so you may well have a very unique model for how you want to manage your players. For most, it'll be an easy choice - if you need a high level of data interaction and it has to be more secure than client-authoritative, a custom game server is almost always the way to go. If your needs are only moderately over the existing limits, it's quite likely that a small increase to the limits for you would be the thing to do. If you'd like to get feedback on the best approach, feel free to either post a follow-up question here in the forums or (if you require privacy due to IP concerns) email us at devrel@playfab.com