Google Play Services - Secure?

News & General Discussion
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Hi all,

I have been building and testing an Android application and I was initially planning on using a MySQL server to hold user information and store game integral things such as game currency, progress etc.

I have been implementing Google Play Services which has a Saved Game option.

Does anyone know whether this is a secure way of storing data such as purchases and in game currency? I haven’t read anything to worry me yet and it has the functionality I need. I wondered if there were any negatives from storing and retrieving game data in this way?

Thanks.

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Rather use something like Gamesparks, its platform agnostic and is a lot more powerful than Google Play or GameCenter etc. Gamesparks is secured with TLS and has server-side logic for checking player currency, managing purchases of virtual goods etc, and you can also confirm receipts/purchases from many of the stores.

I would highly recommend it.

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Is this referring specifically to using Google Play Services, or was this referring to the whole post including the bit about using MySQL yourself?

If you’re going to make your own backend data service then make sure you spend time looking into data security best practices, and don’t just follow internet tutorials to get stuff set up and trust that they’ve got you covered. I could rant at length about this… suffice to say that even if your game’s data isn’t sensitive you need to protect your users from themselves, and some of them will do silly things like sign up to your game using the same credentials as their online banking. (Consider: When you signed up for these forums you gave Unity an email address and a password. How many other things could they access with that information? Even if you are diligent with those things yourself, many people aren’t.)

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Hi chrisrolls55 (and Meltdown, thanks for the mention =) )

What Meltdown mentioned above - “Gamesparks is secured with TLS and has server-side logic for checking player currency, managing purchases of virtual goods etc, and you can also confirm receipts/purchases from many of the stores.” is accurate. GameSparks is very easy to implement (we’re also a unity asset store partner) and can take away all the hassle of worrying about the back end of your game. I’ve provided a few links below that you may find interesting!

GameSparks Product Overview - https://www.gamesparks.com/product/
Getting Started with GameSparks - https://docs.gamesparks.com/getting-started/
Virtual Goods - https://docs.gamesparks.com/documentation/configurator/virtual-goods.html
Currencies - https://docs.gamesparks.com/documentation/configurator/currencies.html
Tutorials - https://docs.gamesparks.com/tutorials/currencies--virtual-goods-and-achievements/

If you have any questions about using GameSparks, please do not hesitate to get in touch with our support team, we’d be happy to help in any way we can! https://support.gamesparks.net/support/home

Best of luck with your project!
Clare

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Thanks for the recommendation Meltdown, it looks like it has everything I would need plus quite a bit more. I’ll definitely be looking into it.

And thanks for the advice angry penguin. I used to help run a SQL server backend as part of my job many years ago so have some exposure to risks and data security etc however as this is essentially a hobby project I would rather use a service that has the functionality I need without having to implement and script my own backend.