MAUs Calculation

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Peter Wiseman asked Apr 26, '19

MAUs Calculation

I'm looking for an alternative to GameSparks and have a question about PlayFab's pricing and how MAUs are calculated. I mean, it seems fairly simple - the Indie tier is $99 for up to 100,000 MAUs and the Pro tier is $0.008 per MAU, so 100,000 x $0.008 is $800/mo. My concern is that if our game got featured by Apple or Google and received a million downloads in a very short space of time, then that could get very pricy. A million MAUs would be $8000 and it's quite likely that a very high percentage of those downloads may only use the App once and then delete it immediately. Does PlayFab have any kind of spike protection built into their MAU calculations? For example, if someone downloaded the game, played it once and deleted it the same day then I think it would be fair for PlayFab not to count that as a MAU. Maybe you only count an MAU after say 100 API requests have been logged by a player. I think I know the answer to this, but does PlayFab protect us from expensive spikes like this? If our game became very popular and we signed up for an Enterprise tier, then what sort of price per MAU can we expect to pay when the MAUs are much higher than 100,000? ChilliConnect seems to have a fairer pricing model where they charge per API request rather than by MAUs. Thanks!

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Answer 1 · 2019-04-26T23:00:44Z

v-humcin answered Apr 26, '19

MAU is determined by the number of unique users who have made an API call. A user that only makes a few API calls would indeed count towards MAU, however our pricing is a blended calculation that takes into account average retention (including one-time users). Also, we do give price-per-MAU discounts at levels over 500,000. And with Enterprise contracts, you can also use Reserved Capacity pricing, as discussed in this post (https://community.playfab.com/questions/21442/my-players-deleted-from-my-title-automatically-250.html). You can contact our sales team here if you would like to determine specifics: https://playfab.com/support/contact/

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brendan commented · Apr 27, 2019 at 12:52 AM

For the ChiliConnect item, we do have a question for you: We went with per-MAU pricing because it's simple, and computed it to try to account for the variations across usage. That does mean that titles that don't do much are paying more than they might otherwise (though we'd prefer that developers take advantage of as much of our tech as they can, obviously). Per-API rates require that you know in great detail the real-world calls the clients will make, which is based on not just how many calls you make in a session, but how long players will stay in your game on average. When we first built the current pricing model, there was a strong aversion to that level of complexity among the developers with whom we spoke.

But that said, we love feedback and it's entirely possible the landscape on this has changed - it has been some time, after all. Are you saying that you'd prefer to lose the simplicity, in favor of a system that charges you based on actual usage?

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Answer 2 · 2019-04-27T03:22:30Z

Peter Wiseman answered Apr 27, '19

@Brendan

I'm not sure what pricing method would benefit me best until I ship the game. I'm thinking the MAU pricing is probably the better option as I think I'd start being stingy with my API requests with ChilliConnect which might compromise the user experience. Then again, my main concern with MAU pricing is paying for a user who downloads the game, plays it once and deletes it immediately rather than converting to a loyal paying user. This kind of churn seems to be quite prevalent when a game is featured on an App Store. When a game is shoved in people's faces, they seem to download it without reading the description and then delete it quite quickly if it isn't for them. One of our games was featured on the front page of the Google Play Store for a week several years ago and it enjoyed about 3 million downloads that month but an alarming number of those players deleted the app quite quickly. As an Indie developer, those kind of numbers at $0.008 per MAU could get quite scary without knowing the potential ARPMAU in advance which is why paying per API request seems less worrying. Unfortunately neither GameSparks or PlayFab is transparent on their enterprise pricing which might reassure my concerns in the case of a large number of downloads. At least PlayFab has a reasonably priced Indie tier with 100,000 free MAUs to test out an app's monetization. Amazon has completely killed any chance of Indies using GameSparks with their new pricing and usage limits. I've invested over a year developing this game with the GameSparks platform so I'm at a difficult decision making point as to which solution to use now as moving to PlayFab would require a lot of work. My biggest worry is Amazon completely killing GameSparks once I've shipped like they did with their Amazon Underground Appstore experiment.

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brendan commented · Apr 27, 2019 at 07:55 PM

"Enterprise" pricing isn't a thing - that's why it's not spelled out. An Enterprise contract specifically is one where we're negotiating with a large developer or publisher because they want a custom agreement, and have high usage levels that they can commit to. It has a significantly higher monthly minimum, due to the fact that all Enterprise agreements include things like a dedicated Slack channel - so, it takes more resource time from us.

As a base, the pricing is $0.008 per MAU for the first 500K, then drops as your MAU goes up (so, $0.007 per MAU for the next block, and so on). We also have Reserved Capacity pricing, where you pre-pay for 12 months of some MAU level (500K and up) in exchange for a significantly lower price. The specifics on that depend upon what MAU level you want to go with. That's generally where most Enterprise agreements go, since those customers can commit to higher usage levels - it's simply applying economy of scale to it.

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