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apptester825 asked

Limitations of playfab for making a high traffic asynchroneous, leaderboard competition?

Dear reader

The forum usually is very responsive and we want to thank for this service here.

Thanks for your committment of reading and hopefully answerring here!

Question

Is Playfab API used for high traffic solutions (> 100 000 players in the database and 10 00 online playing)?

Why relevant?

The developer told us that we should use a customized backend server not playfab API for the networking and game data processing. It is a bit suprising to me as I deemed playfab to be the current best practice solution for this. We are thinking about creating a custom server but for me frankly the complexity of our game is small and I don't undertand why the developer thinks playfab is so limited.

Details

We are using playfab API to create a 2D game with leaderboard, duel mode (non-synchroneous, invitation based), singleplayer and are looking for collecting data about the user activity (progress of rank over time, HitRate% changes or daily average play time for example).

We are using for the prototype currently Corona SDK and I would like to know how viable this combo "COrona sdk + Playfab" as a release solution would be. At the moment loading playerData when clicking on the leaderboard button takes already up to 1 second of loading time at only 11 playerIds sometimes longer.

The loading time should not be much higher than this even at 100 players online concurrently, thus, we will reduce the visible number of player in the leaderboard and add constraints so that not the total player population gets loaded from Playfab.

Thanks for reading and your support.

Matt

Custom Game Servers
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1 Answer

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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

Yes, I can safely say that we can easily support those numbers. Here are some of the numbers for December which we sent out in our latest newsletter ("you" in this context being our developer community):

  • You launched 53 games, taking us up to 454 total live games.
  • You added nearly 9 million monthly players, for a total of 35.5M MAU.
  • You had more than 225 million player sessions. That’s nearly 100 sessions per second.

In addition, our architecture whitepaper (https://api.playfab.com/pdfs/playfabtechnicalwhitepaper_2016.06.18.pdf) provides details for a 1 million CCU (concurrent user) test that we did for a major publisher, to give them confidence on that very issue.

As to whether you need a custom game server, the question to ask is, what is the frequency with which you'll be exchanging data with the player? Many asynchronous games use PlayFab with no custom servers, since they tend to be relatively low frequency - usually only a few calls a minute per player. If your game requires a high frequency of interaction with the player - for example, if you need to control the game simulation entirely on a server, to prevent cheating - that would be a case where you would want to use a custom server.

If you want to get more specific advice for your game, feel free to open a ticket so that you can describe the details of your gameplay with us privately.

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