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Amar avatar image
Amar asked

Microsoft PlayFab -- What does it mean with Pricing and Multiplayer across all platforms and regions?

Are are any details that you can share with PlayFab being part of Microsoft now.

- How does this impact the pricing in tiers, and the billing?

- Will PlayFab and Login credentials merge with Microsoft/Azur?

- Will will be a dedicated server hosting with multiplayer support built into PlayFab offerings?

- How should a new studio starting today vs an existing studio look at this integration?

- Is there a risk of loosing on the live-ops dashboard support or the entire service itself?

- Can existing BizSpark users use any credits towards PlayFab at some point of time?

- Is there any chance PlayFab will be open sourced, as part of Microsoft?

Account ManagementpricingMatchmaking
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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

Sure:

1. There has been no impact to pricing. We are looking at pricing on the Azure-based server hosting we have in beta right now, but you can be sure we'll be pricing that as low as we possibly can. There would be little point in moving to that if we couldn't provide a better deal to developers than we can right now with EC2 hosting.

2. There's no plan to merge login credentials. We currently have, and will continue to have, auth systems from many companies included in our offering,

3. We are working on rolling out Compute v2 right now - it's in beta at the moment, and will be more broadly available next quarter. I'm not sure how you're defining "multiplayer support", but we will be providing an integrated matchmaker, yes.

4. Whether you're a new studio or an existing one isn't important. We continue to have a firm commitment to zero breaking changes. As we have done in the past, we will be improving the service steadily, and sometimes that means deprecating an existing API call, in favor of a better one. When we do that, nothing breaks - we simply stop providing it in supported SDKs, so that new titles are encouraged to move to the newer tech.

5. No, there is zero risk of losing the service or the LiveOps capabilities. A) Microsoft was exceptionally clear in all their statements around the acquisition that PlayFab is a key part of their strategy going forward. B) Our LiveOps capabilities are a clear advantage in the marketplace for us, and for all our customers. The only thing we'll be doing with them is making them even better.

6. As a relatively recent acquisition, PlayFab billing is distinct from billing for long-term Microsoft products, like Office and Azure. As such, we're not part of the existing BizSpark program, though we did do a special offer back around GDC in conjunction with Azure. You can expect we'll look for other opportunities like that in the future, and that we'll integrate with existing business models like BizSpark over time.

7. All the PlayFab SDKs are already open sourced. The full code for them, as well as the SDK generator that is used to build them, are available in our GitHub: http://github.com/playfab. If you mean the server backend code, then no, there's no plan to open source that at this time.

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