I’ve been searching high and low for a replacement to PlayFab services. They appear to be moving away from their original feature set (simple economies, drop tables for randomized loot drops, etc) are moving towards pushing specialized functionality out to Microsoft Azure Functions and catering to multi-million (and billion) dollar companies and games, not indies.
Only today did I figure out Unity now offers “Economy” and “Virtual Shops” as part of their Unity Gaming Services. So my main question is, do any of you with experience using PlayFab know how much of the inventory and economy is equivalent, and what are the pros and cons?
Next: Why isn’t Unity targeting the competition and yelling more loudly to get us using these services as an alternative? GameSparks shut down. PlayFab is moving away from indies and small customers. So now is the time for Unity to publish articles that directly compare their services to those as alternatives. All web articles I find on “alternative to Playfab” are aggregated and outdated lists of services that aren’t even related to player accounts, inventories and IAP economies.
1. I’ve used PlayFab for the past 4 years and have just recently begun transitioning onto UGS for the exact same reasons you mentioned.
While there’s not an exact 1:1 mapping from PlayFab to UGS Economy (and other services like Remote Config, Cloud Save, Cloud Code), it accomplishes very similar functionality with a great deal of flexibility and ease of use.
I’m enjoying UGS Economy’s approach to the setup of inventory items, virtual purchases, etc. There isn’t the same rigidly defined Catalog Item structure as in PlayFab, but I find that flexibility easier to work with for my use case. I’d previously been having to design interactions around various service and data storage/structure limits (multiple separate catalogs, data sizes, abusing existing Catalog Item fields, etc.) on PlayFab that I am not encountering on UGS.
Some of the administrative tasks through the UGS portal were initially unclear (published economy state and environment selection tripped me up at first), but that was mainly just due to misconceptions on my part.
Transitioning my management toolset for items, purchases, and other tasks from PlayFab to UGS is pretty straightforward. I prefer to not manually setup numerous items in the management portal, so having Editor based tooling makes that easier. The majority of work there was simply moving from WebSocket calls to REST.
To sum up, there’s a bit less handholding in UGS in terms of expectations for data layout and use, but the examples given in documentation and samples will allow you to get up and running quickly and map PlayFab concepts onto UGS easily.
2. I would expect to see UGS more clearly shown off as a viable and comprehensive alternative to other BaaS offerings, especially with the other platforms having been shut down or substantially changing.
Thank you for sharing your experience with PF>UGS. Have you used PF’s “Legacy CloudScript” to do server-side inventory manipulations? If so, is there is an equivalent in UGS?
Though I’m not an expert in the capabilities of Playfab’s Legacy CloudScript, I believe UGS’ Cloud Code service is fairly equivalent. Also, if you haven’t already, I recommend checking out our UGS Use Cases sample project. We’ve written quite a few game use cases in order to show how they can be implemented using UGS.
Yes, PlayFab changing to Cloud Script functions (requiring a separate Azure account…) over the now Legacy Cloud Script was one of the motivations for me switching to UGS. And @erika_d is completely correct - Cloud Code is very similar in terms of functionality, with the added benefit (in my opinion) of not having to have all your functionality live in one single uber-script.
I’ve been converting over PlayFab Cloud Script relatively easily. Cross-referencing documentation and samples helps immensely - how to access player inventories, how Remote Config replaces Title Data, etc. I believe the UGS may even be more flexible with runtime metrics as well?
Playfab is definitely a headache to use right now.
The biggest risk with any BaaS is that it might shut down and take your game with it. Most gaming backend services fail within a few years, and they often are so proprietary that it’s difficult or impossible to migrate your existing game content and accounts to a new provider.
Major players run by tech giants, like PlayFab and Firebase, are well-established in the industry and unlikely to go anywhere. On the other hand, as we saw with GameSparks, even a reasonably well-established independent BaaS is at risk of shutting down.
UGS is a new player in a crowded and volatile market. While Unity has a large user base with their engine and related products, they might have trouble clawing out enough market share to make UGS profitable, which could lead to UGS shutting down in the next few years. You also end up with the classic catch-22: people are hesitant to adopt a new product until it’s proven itself, but it’s hard for a product to prove itself if nobody adopts it.
Even if UGS is indie-friendly now, there’s always the risk that once they pick up enterprise customers, they’ll stop catering to indies.
Just to add That Unity has pretty strict limits on the size of your economy. At the time of this message (2025) you can only have 750 items in your catalog, and 1000 inventory items per user!! that seems ridiculously small to me if you hope to have a long term game.