I’m creating a semi-online game, where the player plays offline but some actions he takes will be shown to other players. Now I haven’t used a backend service before and my research proved that those 3 options are the best on the market right now.
Firebase is not really aimed towards games ( as far as I know) but I really like that one feature it provides where if the user is offline it caches his actions and once he reconnects the client automatically resynchronizes with the server and the server automatically resynchronize with all the other registered devices. I don’t think the other two services have such feature, but they do have more features aimed toward games, like dealing with game currency, in-game store items, flash sale, inventory system etc.
So, if someone has any experience with any of these, I would appreciate it if he can prove some insight.
I believe GameSparks has the ability for you to set your requests to be durable so if you lose connection, each request will be cached and upon Re-connection, the client with send the requests out in order to synchronize itself.
I strongly suggest checking out the privacy policy and terms of service for the service you’ll be using, especially if it’s “free”. When I was looking at analytics/service backends for a game and reading privacy policies some of them were scarily broad about what they could or would do with the data collected.
The thing here is that whatever you agree to also effects your players, because it’s their data being collected. I’m wary of this because I’m pretty sure that most people aren’t in the mood to read several pages of a legal document when they’re starting up a new game for the first time. It of course depends heavily on the audience of your game - plenty genuinely won’t care and are already willfully putting such information online via Facebook or whatever anyway.
Whatever the case, just be aware of what you - and your players - need to agree to.
There is an open-source alternative game server called Nakama - it has a realtime multiplayer component that I think suits your needs very well. You can find the asset store package here.
I went with Playfab because I’m targeting a market with a LOT of not paying users, and paying for Gamesparks fees wont be profitable for me. I think however, that Gamesparks is an excellent backend service.
I’ve used both GameSparks and PlayFab. I think PlayFab is easier to use from a dashboard perspective. From the perspective of the api on the client side, they are pretty much the same.
PlayFab seems to have more features that you’d likely want for most games ready to use out of the box.
PlayFabs free tier is better value than GameSparks. This is the main reason i switched to PlayFab. But that only works because my game requires minimal data per user. But I haven’t done a decent cost analysis on the two when you need to scale data and processing up.
Yeah I had a quick look. PlayFab is still easier. I also find GameSparks portal to be very slow when refreshing pages but that’s probably to do with where I am in the world.
PlayFab is newer and its demo is a really completed game, plus having a answer forum like Unity with relatively fast response.
However, I gave up PlayFab because it doesn’t have the guild/clan function implemented at that time, then I moved on to GameSparks, which is a bit harder to learn, question forum is not that friendly, but once i get into it I find no much problem and I will stick with it.
For some reason we need to use Firebase Analytics, and are pretty interested in the whole Firebase solution too, may give it a try when we have time.
I am sorry to hear you did not find our forums friendly. If you like, you can link me to your post so I can look into this and see what I can do to improve the forum experience for our users.
Are there any video tutorials on Unity + Gamesparks , I am utterly confused by the zillion options on their website , and cant figure out where to start .
