question

Hopefully we'll get a few folks talking about their experiences (personally, I've spoken to quite a few developers who have made that switch) here, but if you can share what specific components you're needing to integrate, we can at the least get you a few pointers and tips. It's almost all Web API calls (apart from actual download of content and custom game server usage), though we are adding more features in the near future that'll go a bit beyond that, like the upcoming PubSub feature.

But the main thing to understand in getting started with our features is that PlayFab was built around a few core concepts: being able to take as much of the DevOps off your plate as possible and giving you all the LiveOps capabilities you need to be as successful as possible, while keeping our pricing as low as we can.

For the DevOps side of things, we decided up front that we would take care of managing all the data queries under the covers. Issues with queries are among the most common problems games run into in their backends, and in more than a few high profile cases have been the cause of game disruptions and downtimes. Even setting aside queries that have bad behavior, even good-seeming ones can run into issues as you hit higher scale. We've had a number of times throughout PlayFab's history where we've updated the fundamentals of our service in order to allow titles to grow ever larger ('m sure we'll be publishing new numbers soon - GDC, if nothing else - but we passed 100M MAU around the time we joined the Games org at Microsoft).

The pricing part goes hand-in-hand with that DevOps work we do. We made PlayFab a single shared service with a high level of security (no title is ever exposed to any other title's data - apart from your own sharing of data between titles in your studio) specifically in order to give everyone the benefit of that economy of scale. That also means we can provide a free tier for developers who are just starting out, so that they can build and launch games without fear of getting a huge bill if they get far more users than they expected.

For the LiveOps side, we built PlayStream into the core of the service so that every action taken by every player is tracked and immediately available for segmentation, action triggers, etc. That way, your game can respond (and adapt) to the players' behaviors in real time. This last part is fairly limited in our free tier, but you do have a few actions and segments to play around with and get the feel for it.

Of all of it, the one place I'd say we're very aware that we need to improve is in our Cloud Script. Right now, it's simply JavaScript run in a V8 engine that we host in a suite of logic servers. So debugging is extremely limited (really just log lines in the return). We're working on an update that'll allow you to use Azure Functions, which will give you the ability to use C# (or any other .NET language you like) and far better debugging.

Hi there,

Another GS pricing affected here, i consider myself quite advanced GS developer and its a shame i had to not continue with them due to this new model.

Anyhow, this is what i expect from an alternative that can fully replace what i was able to do with GS. Playfab seems to have everything but i need some clarification in these points

1- Proper Database with pagination, random selection, other queries so i can

a- Community created and official levels (combination of images and textual content)

a level could be an image along with its meta data , What important for me is show new levels added, popular, trending, and then randomly selected levels along with pagination.

b- Due to GS's database, i was able to provide in-game localization where users were able to add new languages and content.

2- Realtime Multiplayer (Even GS didnt provide it free and i was willing to pay for realtime multiplayer as long as its affordable for indies to grow) including match making and everything between

3- Community related features from realtime Chat (Audio, Video, Textual with ML based content filtering) to messaging to invites etc

4- Leaderboards which we can sort/filter (GS doesnt let us sort/filter)

5- Availability everywhere in the world from China to Russia

Thanks

@manofspirit: The OP was really asking for advice from folks on how to migrate his title to PlayFab, but to address your list of items:

1. Sounds like what you mean is that you need a full User Generated Content service (community created levels, etc.). And yes, the UGC service we mentioned in the blog (https://blog.playfab.com/blog/upcoming-roadmap-2019-q1-jan-march-edition) supports all of that. It also supports letting your players charge real money for their content, with you setting the revenue share.

2. We support custom game server hosting, where the cost is simply that - the cost of the server hosting (since they are running dedicated to your title). In our legacy multiplayer model, we just pass on the EC2 cost with a 10% markup to cover our costs. In our Servers v2, we're passing on the Azure cost directly (though with a 30% discount from the public price, currently). We also support integration with Photon Realtime, if you don't need full control of the simulation in the cloud.

3. We don't currently have a chat service available, but we are looking at that as a potential future addition. Keep an eye on our blog for more on this later.

4. I'm not sure how complex of sorting/filtering you need, but our newer leaderboard service (also mentioned in the blog post above) will provide for more sorting/filtering options, as well as bucketization.

5. We currently have games running in the service with players all over the world, including Russia and China. The problem Russia had for a while was that their government blocked all AWS traffic. There's nothing anyone outside the Russian government can do about that when it happens, but over time more of PlayFab will be running in Azure, which so far has not been blocked. For China, the issue is the Great Firewall. Right now, there are two options: either your players have to use a VPN (a common use case there), or you can work with one of the edge service providers (like Akamai) and partner with a China-based company in order to have a valid license to operate in that region. That would enable your traffic to flow though the firewall (and speeds up ping times, in our experience).