I used to use PlayFab for the backend of my game. Since they changed their pricing, I am looking for a new backend solution that doesn’t have a player limit. PlayFab currently has 10k player for free tiers, which is not enough to make money initially then buy higher tiers in my opinion.
My game isn’t a realtime multiplayer game but I have to save players’ data somewhere and update them depending on the players’ actions in the game. Is there any backend solution for games that doesn’t have a player limit?
Yes and no. Cost for the server itself should be less than $100/mo. A basic virtual private server can be rented for as little as $5/mo and scaling it up as the game grows is generally as easy as requesting a larger capacity and waiting a few minutes for it to restart. Or you could choose a cloud server and have it scale as needed.
That said time is money. You have to factor in the time it takes you to create or find a solution, set up everything, and check every once in a while to verify that everything is running smoothly. For some developers their time is worth far more than that $100.
Lets say 10k active players in the standard tier costs you $100 + $100 of metered events. That means you need to make 0.02c per player per month. If you can’t make that (through ads, subscriptions, donations or IAP) then your game isn’t viable.
Note that 10k active players will be heading towards a full time job just to manage the player base (fixes, updates, tech support, community management, etc).
“The pivot number – the number to focus on – is not the $50 ARPPU but the $1-2 ARPU,” he says. “That’s the number that a new paying customer is worth to you. If that number were, say, 20 cents, you’d probably have a difficult time building a business.”
i.e. at least according to these guys if your ARPU is 0.02c you are dead in the water by a factor of at least 10, and probably more like 50.
In other words the PlayFab costs aren’t going to be the limiting factor.
I use Gamesparks, but they changed their pricing to be non-indie friendly, they used to have an awesome free tier.
I would suggest implementing something like Azure Functions or AWS Lambda, they are basically API methods you can create, that you can use to perform cloud logic, such as saving/loading player data. Obviously you’d need the function to talk to a database instance in Azure/AWS too, for the storage.
The nice thing about the functions is you only get charged each time they’re called, you don’t get charged for them just sitting there, although not sure about the database pricing. I’d recommend a NoSQL db for game storage.
If all the 10k users are unique then it is okay of course but since a user can create as many accounts as they want, that might be an issue. If everyone creates 2 accounts in the game, that means 5k users. This is the problem with the player limit. If the limit depended on MAU, it wouldn’t be a problem. Currently, I don’t think PlayFab is indie friendly anymore.
Makes no sense: the Standard plan has unlimited players in Live games. A user could sign up a million accounts at no additional cost to you. The metering only comes in to effect when they actually login and play your game.
There’s no problem with creating your own server, but if you are actually serious about building a game that has a real player base this isn’t a matter of spinning up a private server. You will get bombarded with hackers and DDOS attempts if you get any kind of success, so at minimum you will need multiple servers, load balancer, firewalls, monitoring, logging, backups, etc.
It is all absolutely within the realm of a ‘serious hobbyist’ to do this, but you will be spending a lot of time on infra work, so if its not something you enjoy then its probably not the best course of action*
If you are just building a game for your own enjoyment to maybe get a few hundred active players well then the free version of PlayFab is fine. If you get bombarded with some user creating a bunch of accounts you manually go in and delete them.
Not to mention you actually have to build your backend. You can get going in PlayFab or one of the other backend services in hours (if not minutes), but building a solid backend from scratch will be a large piece of work.
There is at least one solution available on Github under an open source license. I was originally going to link to it in my first post but I decided against it because I have no experience with it. It’s designed to be deployed onto one of the major cloud servers.
I completely agree that the effort involved in creating and maintaining your own server can very easily surpass the cost of a service like PlayFab, but I don’t know how much I can agree with the idea that you will be hacked and DDOSed after any degree of success. I definitely agree it will happen at some point though.
I just checked the pricing again and I noticed something this time around that slipped my mind the first time. It’s not just unlimited players. It’s unlimited live titles too. You can have as many live games as you want for that $99/mo.
By comparison GameSparks is $299/mo per game as mentioned in their FAQ making them even less attractive.
Spinning up a server you will see that you start getting IP scans, and automated SSH login attempts almost immediately. On AWS it takes about 30 seconds from spinning up a public instance until the scanners start hitting you. It will take longer for IPs that aren’t in a juicy target like AWS, but not long.
We see minor DDOS attempts in our fintech startup at least every few months, the last was a sustained attack hitting up to 1k packets per second for several hours at a time. This is after the built in smarts of AWS. These days we are well known so maybe its not so surprising, but even in the early days when we had just a few customers we were getting focused attacks.
If you have 10k active players you will be a target at some stage as you suggest, and I think probably much sooner than you think. You don’t need targeted attacks either: DDOSing can be super powerful force in online games, for example causing a server to lag to stop people reacting to an attack.
One thing to also consider is how the game responds to lag and delivery failure. If its players actions in a turn based game which includes timers and the like, then its pretty important. If its a slow paced game where you only need to make periodic updates with little impact of having to retry its much simpler.
Again a lot of this also comes down to how serious the venture is. I mean if people are paying a subscription fee or spending real money inside the game there is some onus to deliver a good, outage, free experience. Even if you don’t care about it morally a poor experience is probably going to negatively impact the size of your player base.
Their lowest cost plan is only $15 a month which includes unlimited users and 1 million API calls. Included storage in this tier is only 200MB, but you can add space at 5c per GB per month.
Well, as it won’t be successful by default, the home brew option can get things started. But then, the time investment for the home brew version would be the same as learning a decent BaaS, so if the cost of entry is very small, go with the managed service. Don’t worry too much about scaling costs, these places are designed to scale like a greasy accountant.
I think, you don’t know the new pricing system. The free tier does have 10k players limit. Unlimited players is only available for paid tiers. As I said, that 10k player limit is not for unique players or MAU but just the number of accounts, which you cannot count how many unique players there are in the game.
Manually going in and deleting accounts doesn’t make any sense since there can be up to 10k accounts and you will never know if that user will come back and play the game again.
I have enough time to make my own server and have an experiment. If the game becomes so popular, I of course consider to pay or hire people in order to maintain the services. No one would seriously try to shutdown an unpopular game. It’s worthless.
I haven’t used GameSparks but their system looks better than PlayFab. There is achievement systems, messaging etc. In PlayFab, it is just key-value pairs. You have to give the data meanings in order to make complex systems like achievement systems or a message box. (I couldn’t find a proper word to describe it since English is not my first language but I hope you understand). The downside is their price is a bit high.
He’s very clearly aware of the pricing as he talks about the standard plan in depth. He’s just completely ignoring the free plan as I’d expect most people to do. It’s there for evaluation and for people making games for fun rather than profit.
I looked at your post history, it seems like you are new to this, and the simpler you make your approach, the more likely you will be to release something.
You seem to be caught up on this issue of players creating too many accounts, when the much more likely issues are:
you not finishing anything
you not getting any players
This is not said in a mean spirited way: its simply the problem with most indie games, even those from experienced teams.
If you get to the point where you have people playing your game, and you problem is some of them creating too many accounts, then I think you can probably manage to find the few hundred dollars a month required to get support your games growth until your monetisation strategies kick in.
(Not to mention I’ve already pointed out much cheaper services)
This is a CDN essentially, @tomang5 is looking for a full game management/player data backend solution.
I’m surprised with Unity having moved to the services based approach with Jon Riccitello at the helm a full backend solution like GameSparks or Playfab hasn’t been developed at Unity yet.