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jjk2 avatar image
jjk2 asked

does playfab makes sense for pc games without in game purchases or subscriptions?,

basically I have a basic FPS shooter game but my primary concern is because everything is metered on Playfab what if my users play the game for hours? How much will it cost for someone playing online for an hour? Say they spend 50 hours per year multiplied by hundred thousand how much will that cost?

If I sell a game that is fixed price wouldn't playfab eventually end up eating up the cost? I just don't see how it can operate in the long run without some in game purchases or subscription.

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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

Yes, we have quite a lot of games that don't have in-game purchases or subscriptions. Since point-of-purchase games make all their money up front, they just include in their business planning an analysis of what the average user will cost them. Many FPS games, for example, use custom game server hosting - normally, that's the majority of their expenses for online their service needs. So in your example, one hour of one player would be the cost of one hour of hosting whatever server type you go with, divided by the average number of players you expect to be on the server. How many players your servers can support is going to vary pretty considerably depending on what all your executable does and how optimized it is.

Let's use the relay service part of Party as the example, since that'll be simpler. Party has a per-minute connected cost of $0.0001 per player. So, to get to $1 of connection cost, the player would have to play for 10,000 minutes, or about 167 hours. Party also charges for total egress (all data sent out to players), but again, that's going to wildly vary based on your game's logic. It's pennies per GB though (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/multiplayer/networking/pricing), so that's unlikely to be the majority of the costs there.

The rest of the features of the service can be calculated in a similar manner - just work out what you believe the average player will use, and plug those numbers (details on meter spin is in here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/pricing/consumption-best-practices) in to calculate the pricing (http://playfab.com/pricing). Again, there are extreme variations on feature use by title, but an FPS game that only updates the player state at the end of the session (since the game server is hosting the data up to that point) usually doesn't hit the other meters very hard on a per-player basis.

But to fully answer the question, I'd have to account for your "eventually". If you take that to the extreme, then sure, I'd answer that given the normal average pricing on point-of-purchase games, if someone dedicates all their spare time literally to doing nothing but play your game for years, then yes, they'll cost you more than you make on the sale to them. And a wildly popular, hyper-addictive game might have a handful of players that do that. But the majority of players will not, which is why the point-of-purchase model isn't in any danger, despite the fact that even those games use backend services now. Being able to be connected to your community by having the telemetry data coming in (understanding how your community uses your game) and having tools to update their experience and communicate with them as quickly as possible is a critical part of how games are made nowdays.

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Max Guernsey, III avatar image Max Guernsey, III commented ·

The "eventually" probably cancels itself out. If you are so popular that you have people making it their life's work to play your game, those same people are probably gobbling up most or all of the expansion content you are almost assuredly developing to capitalize on the market you've created.

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