question

Sure, taking your items in order:

> 1. Ability to save additional player data (coins, xp points, # shields etc..)

Yes, you can save state data to our service, but I'd recommend that coins be saved as a Virtual Currency, and XP as a Statistic. I'm not sure how you're using shields, but that might be a good case for a stackable inventory item.

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-commerce/currencies

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-tournaments/using-resettable-statistics-and-leaderboards

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/#landing-commerce

> 2. Implement leaderboards (duh! - I think even the little guys can do this one..)

Also yes - the statistics tutorial above goes into detail on this.

> 3. I want to be able to present the players with special deals that would pop-up on game start (I have the client side code of course just want to know how it's done on the playfab side).

There are a variety of ways to do this. If you literally want it to be whenever the game starts, you'd just query a store on start and display it to the player (we're purely a backend service - we don't interfere in the display layer of your game in any way). But I'd also recommend checking out our tutorial on user segmentation and, from there (linked at the end of that one), the one on store segmentation:

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-players/segmentation

> 4. Download island data to update the next level.

Is this metadata about the levels that's the same for all players? If so, you could use Title Data for that:

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-content/using-title-data

> 5. Multi-player - Do I use Playfab or do I need to use Photon Pun?

It depends upon what you mean. If you want to do a simple turn-based game and don't need to connect the players directly, you can just use our service as-is (potentially also using our PubSub service, which we'll make available soon: https://blog.playfab.com/blog/upcoming-roadmap-2018-q4-oct-dec-edition). If you want to have a "room" experience where you connect players to each other in realtime, you may want to consider Photon. Finally, if you need to have the simulation of the game completely controlled server-side, for a realtime game where you prevent players from cheating, you'll want to look into building a custom game server (either hosted with us or elsewhere):

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-tournaments/custom-game-servers

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/external-game-servers

And this is in preview for our Indie/Pro/Enterprise customers, and will be available to everyone soon:

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-tournaments/multiplayer-servers-2.0

> 6. Ad's - What Ad solution will give me the best for my money as well as make money?

We can't really advise on services that aren't ours, as we have no control over their service model and pricing, nor do we have insight into how their services are managed. We're considering offering an ad service of our own in future. If that's something you'd like to see, I'd recommend letting us know in our feature requests forum.

> 7. Can I have one store? Do I need to create a store on GooglePlay? Unity? Apple? which is the best to go with?

In terms of payment providers, it depends upon a few things. If you're shipping on Android or iTunes, yes, you have to use them as your payment provider, as that's a requirement for their platforms. The same is true for Steam, PlayStation, or Xbox Live. Unity is not a payment provider, however.

I'd recommend checking out our Commerce tutorials, linked above. In general, if you're going to have in-app purchases (IAP), you'll want to just sell VC in the real-money store, and do everything else using the VC, to make things simple (and that way, all the VC purchases can just be defined in PlayFab).

> 8. I was having a major issue with GameSparks getting it to recognize the Facebook player without having to confirm with the player every time they opened the application.

In order to log a player in using Facebook as the identity provider, you have to get a token from that service for the player. That requires a check against Facebook's Graph API, which may pop a request to the user. The question is, what all are you using with Facebook? If you just want to have that as a linked identity so that you can let the player recover their account on another device, you can just use our auth best practices - create the account with a zero-friction method, like a device ID, have them link Facebook later, but then just use the device login unless they're trying to recover their account:

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-players/best-login

> 9. If I want to send alerts to the user, do I have to register with GooglePlay, Apple and Facebook or can the app just alert them like the old school way of doing it worked.

What is the "old school way" you're referring to? If you're talking about sending a notice to the user whether or not they're currently playing your game, you're referring to Push Notifications on mobile devices. And yes, those are services that you're using through GooglePlay and iTunes, so they require that you set up the Push Notification in their service, then register the player device:

https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-players/push-notification-basics

However, if you mean pushing arbitrary data to the player while they're in the game, we'll be providing a publish/subscribe (the PubSub mentioned above) service in the near future. Right now, you'd poll for updated info on login or periodically while the player is signed in. The PubSub service will let you push arbitrary data to the connected client at any time.