Hello, we are currently developing a tittle which will be available for Steam, Xbox, PS4 and Nintendo Switch.
Initially we had considered using playfab since it was a system which allowed for cross-platform implementations. But after some analysis of guidelines requirements from the platforms a few trick situations appeared.
The basic idea is that we would need to discover from which platform each player is, I think it is possible but honestly have not confirmed in the API, so just throwing this here. The other and biggest issue is that beyond having a cross platform leaderboard, for Sony we would have to also implement a exclusive PSN users ranking. Not sure how would you recommend filtering that?
We are considering here to simplify things and give up on the cross-platform feature and make for each platform its exclusive leaderboard. We consider the best approach to this would be to create a product for each platform with its own leaderboard ID so the data are all correctly separated, would you agree this is the best idea? Also, being honest, this would be a more economic approach for us as well, as we would distribute the users between different products and therefore avoid reaching the free limit sooner.
If we follow this approach, there is no way in the future that we can try to migrate the data from each product into a single one or trying to call multiple products/leaderboards and mixing them together to show a global cross-platform score right?
Basically our game is a platformer with something like 32 levels, each with its own leaderboard. We are considering creating a leaderboard for each update of a level we have to make in patches so we can still keep track of previous leaderboards for previous versions and still allow for users without patches to send and compete with leaderboard from previous versions forever. Not sure if this is clear.. Basically an ideal feature would be if we could use the leaderboard version feature from PlayFab and still allow users to send scores to previous versions, but for what I've read this is only possible for a short period of time right?
Well, there are a lot of points in my "question", but I hope some thoughts can be given based on my situation and how to handle it the best way possible. Will try to just summarize things.
1. Can I discover from which platform a player is so I can display a custom image next to a player rank?
2. Can I filter a cross-platform leaderboards to retrieve only results of a specific platform and get its addapted rank? (Like, in a global situation a user is 1900th, but in a platform exclusive competition he is in 800th)
3. If not cross-platform is creating several products for the same game but for each platform the best approach?
4. If starting as not cross-platform, is there any possibility of mixing them into a cross-platform leaderboard later?
5. Best approach for keeping multiple versions of a leaderboard still alowing users to update previous leaderboard versions even if they are not the most up to date one.
