Hey guys,
a few months ago I got burnt by Playtomic. I released PhRONIX using their player data service, and just before launch the service dropped out completely. One of the most important features of my game wasn’t working.
My response was to start working on my own analytics service (+ data + highscores) and it is slowly progressing towards something pretty neat. Its key differentiator is that is completely integrated in to Unity*:
- Click on a Scene to see details of how often that scene is played, how long the paly time is, etc.
- Highlight a group of scenes and see a chart of plays for each scene (what level are people quitting on?).
- Click an enemy in a scene and see how many times it has killed the player vs how many times it was killed by the player.
My question… how would you like such a service delivered?
The back-end runs on Google App Engine and my original plan was to run it like most other hosted services. However this exposes every one else to the risk that I had with Playtomic. How do you know the service will be up and running and meeting its SLA’s?
The alternative I have been considering is to allow users to host their own service. i.e. the package comes with an EAR file ready to be deployed to GAE. You can sign up for GAE and host your own service, you control the uptime, availability, etc.
The issue of course with this approach is no long term revenue for me… the price of the asset itself would need to be much higher.
Thoughts?
- John A
- There will be a web interface too. You may not want to start Unity every time you want to check some data.