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robert avatar image
robert asked

Roadmap, sometime?

Do you plan to ever provide a real roadmap (public or closed) regarding your ongoing and future development? (we don't need a list of promised features or dates, but we would love to get an idea where your priorities are). Out of a lot of partners and frameworks we use, Playfab is unfortunately the one and only we never have any idea whats going to happen.

Its really hard to plan development of new games or align overall strategies for lets say the next 6 or 12 months without knowing where playfab is heading to. Recently you published a roadmap blog post which is good already, but I guess or hope there are ton more features/bugs you actually work on. (e.g. just read the thread about still not being able to remove a leaderboard with the hint that a lot of stuff is coming to the leaderboard system, which wasn't mentioned in the roadmap blog post at all for example).

A simple list with features planned for the next 6 or 12 months which gets updated lets say every month with stats like (in progress, at risk, delayed, etc..) would just be awesome. Something like this: https://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap

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Joshua Strunk avatar image
Joshua Strunk answered

This comes up pretty often and really it is a tough spot for PlayFab to be in. Obviously, something might change with them being acquired by MS but your point "Its really hard to plan development of new games or align overall strategies for lets say the next 6 or 12 months without knowing where playfab is heading to." is exactly why they don't provide a roadmap. They do not want there customers planning for features that might ultimately get pushed out or canceled.

This goes for any service, even Unity with their roadmap, when it comes to building your next title you should assume you will have access to what is available today not what is promised for tomorrow.

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robert avatar image robert commented ·

Thanks for you answer Joshua. But this is something we don't agree on at all. We are in the app business since 2009 with more than 500million installs and would not be there anymore if we didn't anticipate future developments or didn't align our strategies with upcoming developments.

As mentioned, we don't request fixed time frames or promised features or something similar. But if we know that for example in the next 12 months support for realtime features might come, or a full featured clan system, reward system, integrated (better) ad reward system, messaging, challenging, etc.... this is something we would consider in our current development already. Releasing a game and having to read one week later on a blog post about a new released feature we would have required but worked around in a long time consuming way is something we would like to avoid. Hope you get the point. Think Google, Ad networks, Analytics, Photon, Unity, etc... we usually are very well aware of whats going to happen on their side in the next 12 months. Not so for playfab, its a black box. No idea if tomorrow the next big playfab v2 is coming or where it is heading at all....

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brendan avatar image brendan robert commented ·

To date, we've had to pivot our schedule frequently, in order to account for changes in the live service. Hence, the reason we haven't been able to talk about upcoming features - while I understand that you're saying you don't need dates, whenever this topic has come up in the past, that's specifically been requested, and we don't want someone to take a dependency on having something we're not 100% confident we'll be delivering when we say we will.

That said, we've talked about two features we're working on right now - a new data system, to support arbitrary data types and more efficient small data storage, and a V1 guilds system (create guilds, apply for membership, accept/reject/promote members) in a few places, so we can certainly confirm that those are coming soon (possibly before GDC, but if not, it will definitely be shortly afterward). And it's possible that as we integrate more fully with Microsoft, we'll be able to talk about features in development further ahead.

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robert avatar image robert commented ·

>> This goes for any service, even Unity with their roadmap, when it comes to building your next title you should assume you will have access to what is available today not what is promised for tomorrow.

Ahm, no. Not at all. Usually you have a contact to such companies to synchronise your development for such new features.

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