question

You have my apologies for where we weren't clear - we're well aware that our documentation for some things has been lacking, and we're working on that. I'll specifically address each point as best I can:

> ...growing limitations (that were not transparent until recently, but I accepted them)...

From the beginning, we stated that we would have to apply reasonable limits to features. At the start of the company, it wasn't possible for us to have all the limits in place, so as we added actual monitoring and enforcement, we grandfathered in all live titles, so that no one would have a breaking issue. However, it's literally impossible for us to operate as a business if we simply allow all titles to have unlimited use of the service, so we have since reached out to developers with successful titles, to ask that they pay a reasonable rate for their usage. Our pricing is a best-effort, based upon our costs, and built in such a way as to make it as simple as possible. Some titles use more services or more API calls, and some use less. Our choice was between having extremely complex, usage-based pricing, and simple, MAU-based pricing. We chose the latter, but we continue to experiment with pricing models, to see if we can find something that will be preferable to different developer segments (while still allowing us to stay in business).

> slowing down of features (including the ability to do something like delete stats instead of asking us to make a new title every time

While we do want to provide the ability to delete statistics, we didn't design it in from the start, and so have been stalled on adding that. Since it's simple to create a new title and most developers did that when needed, this clearly hasn't been a high priority for us. But it is a pain point we're well aware of.

However, I do have to take exception to the phrasing of "slowing down of features". We've been exceedingly specific in our messaging concerning the fact that we cannot and will not promise delivery dates for things that aren't in active development. As a live service, it's simply not possible for us to determine when features will be delivered if they're not currently in process, as we have to make adjustments for live titles constantly.

You have my apologies for any features we've not delivered that you would like to have, but we do not promise things we can't guarantee we'll deliver. Anything else would be setting our customers up for failure.

> $299/mo appeared on my contract offered before this was changed on the website

So I know we've discussed this with you in one-on-one conversations, but since it's called out here, I'll go ahead and address it. We've had a monthly minimum on our Pro Tier contracts since they were first introduced. It's in the text of the contract, and no one is billed that monthly minimum unless they've signed the contract. I will absolutely agree that the site didn't list the monthly minimum, as it should have, but we have never billed anyone any charge that wasn't made explicitly clear ahead of time.

> This thread will probably be filtered out, but I hope PlayFab will do the right thing and do what they did not do before: Inform their users with transparency.

No, we're not in the business of trying to hide our mistakes - we're in the business of trying to do the best we can for our customers, and helping to make up for any mistakes we do make. You've already heard from me privately, and now publicly, that I personally regret the places where our communication has been less than perfect, and has caused you angst. We try to be as transparent as possible in all our communications, from features to pricing. But I'll be the first to admit that we're human, and we're bound to trip ourselves up from time to time.

Ultimately, our philosophy is this:

We want to provide a backend service for games that enables developers to have a broad range of functionality that enable rich features as inexpensively as possible.

We want to continually expand those capabilities, to give developers more tools to create new gameplay experiences and to achieve success.

Doing so has real-world costs that have to be accounted for, from running server to paying a staff of engineers to keep all those services running at a high level of availability, and continually expand on them. But by amortizing those costs across many titles, we make it less expensive for everyone (and save on the headaches of trying to hire people to run it all). But we do ask that developers pay their fair share for their usage, for cases where they want to hold us to a high standard of service. That's part of the point of the Pro Tier - that we provide a Service Level Agreement and one-on-one support via our ticketing system, so that professional developers can count on us exactly as if we were their own backend team.

Because we are.