New Pricing Model for the better or the greed?

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under-struck asked Apr 6, '20

New Pricing Model for the better or the greed?

This is make or break for us as PlayFabs new pricing model as we understand is out right ridiculous, but lets entertain it for a bit and get clarity on the below concenrs:

Why did you go from 100 000 MAU to 10 000 players per title x 10 titles, what if we plan for a million players for our title?

Is it a event per player or server tick rate for all players currently connected? As this is pretty much greed if it is per player, now imagen we have 2000 players, we update per player the following:

Picking up items, trading, moving their positions, crafting, selling, rewards etc"yes there is more" - this will happen a minimum 10 times a hour and 10 hours a day, 10 x 10 x 30 = 3000 updates per player a month x 2000 = 6 000 000... okay next

Leaderboard standings? lets say once a day x 30 = 30 "-_-) duh" x 2000 = 60 000.

We create 20 waves per player per instance, right these waves each contain 10 entities "Now not sure if this is only for players or objects as well" a instance takes on average 20 minutes okay so 20 x 10 = 200 x 3 = 600 per player an hour x 10 hours a day = 6000 right x 2000 players = 12 000 000.....

So now we not even started and we have almost reached our cap by going bare minimum sitting at 18 060 000 not only does this greed concern me but you basically killing any and every free to play game out there and to come, yes we will have revenue but as you know there is a lot that needs to be paid in terms of running an online multiplayer game - support, cloud or bare or hybrid servers etc.

Now some of you are like but why don't you build your own backend systems? This wasn't a problem on the previous pricing model when we started planning this 9 months ago, we are also a small group starting on the side while still maintaining an income, not only that but we don't have the skills or the funds to hire them...

Sorry for the rant this comes at a critical time as we where about to launch in alpha in 2 weeks and our testers is all ready a 1000 players, beta launch 2 months after that and then full launch by end of the year.

PlayStream Events

1 Million Events

20 Million Events $6 per additional million

500 Million Events $5.70 per additional million

Telemetry Events

1 Million Events

10 Million Events $2.50 per additional million

500 Million Events $2.38 per additional million

entities pricing PlayStream

10 |1200

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Answer 1 · 2020-04-06T19:29:36Z

brendan answered Apr 6, '20

First, let me clarify the players per title:

In the new model, you can have up to 10 titles in Development Mode. That's intended as a way to give you the ability to develop your titles for free, so that you're not worried about costs in the core service until you go live. Once you move a title out of Development Mode, there is no limit on the number of player accounts it can have.

The new pricing model is based on consumption of a number of meters (detailed here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/pricing/meters/meters). Those meters aren't a one-to-one of specific API calls. They're based on the actual work done by the server to update and process data. We're working to provide additional clarify, and to get the meters exposed to all titles right now, and developers using PlayFab today can contact our sales team to get a breakdown of their current usage.

In terms of the event meter, one event in PlayStream is one event in the event history you can see in the Game Manager. Since PlayStream is an integral part of the LiveOps core of PlayFab, that does mean that your title generates a PlayStream event for a player login, a purchase, etc.

I will add that we are actively listening to all feedback on the new pricing model, and are reviewing it internally. We knew this would be potentially disruptive for some developers, but it was a change we had to make in order to be able to continue providing the service to everyone. And to do so in a way that was fair to all users, so that we don't have a small number of titles driving up costs that then have to somehow be shouldered by other paying customers.

10 |1200

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