The new plan will allow only 10 CCUs on the free tier. It’s called “development” now. The standard tier costs $300 for up to 1000 CCU and 38,000 MAU. I personally will have a hard time affording that. You can learn more about it here https://www.gamesparks.com/pricing/
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Oh yeah, I remember now. I was going to ask Unity if they fancied making a BAAS service, because you can never have too many services, and I cannot be arsed to go looking around.
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Just when I’m finishing my game they take realtime and matchmaking out of the standard plan.
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Same, I set a launch date for two months from now, not sure if I’ll make it! But I contacted support to see if they can do anything, Ill post back here when I hear something.
I had completely forgotten that they were bought up by Amazon. Just in case anyone doesn’t know the original cost for indie developers was $0.02 per MAU but the first 100,000 was completely free. I don’t believe there was a cap of CCUs either. Supporting the same number of users now would be at least $800 per month.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161103011502/http://www.gamesparks.com/pricing/
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Thanks - that sounds much more reasonable…
There’s a thread on Reddit with some insight from somebody claiming to work there
It’s sad really, GameSparks had built a really great service with a nice workflow, and (pre-Amazon) their support was top-notch.
When they removed their powerful+flexible MongoDB support to switch to DynamoDB (with severely limited functionality), it started to become obvious the way things were heading, and now they’ve killed off their previously-very-attractive indie pricing tier too 
It seems to be getting harder to trust anything offered ‘as a service’ or ‘in the cloud’. Bad things can happen suddenly and completely out of your control. And if a small company develops something fantastic, it seems only a matter of time until they’re gobbled up and spat out by a huge company.
In an ideal world, a group of indies/hobbyists would get together and try to build a fully open-source/self-hostable back end service. It’s something that so many games need these days - whether it’s just for a few leaderboards, or full online multiplayer with inventories, stats, IAPs and more.
(I’m surprised that Unity haven’t built a BaaS yet, really - it’s becoming more and more an essential part of any modern multiplayer game, and there’s not a vast amount of competition in that area. Or maybe it’s part of their longer term ‘connected games’ plans?)
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What about Apache Usergrid?
I’ve heard good things about Nakama which is open source and has Unity support - https://heroiclabs.com/
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Yeah I want something properly managed though, because indies managing their own backends is a recipe for disaster unless there’s only 10 customers of course 
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For what it’s worth nakama does have a managed option, as well as commercial technical support etc. It is used by quite a few game companies going by their customer list.
https://heroiclabs.com/managed-cloud/
They use the open source but optional commercial support model which I am a big fan of.
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Well this sucks ass. Guess I’m going to have to migrate my current project to Nakama or something.
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HAHA this was on my hacknplan sprint for this week. Thank god I did not waste time doing that. Going with my own solution now. Third parties are too risky.
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I tend to trust Unity more than I should, but Unity knows their business model is partly due to the brand awareness that they democratise game dev. If they lose that branding (and they haven’t been talking about it for a long time, which is worrying) then everyone needs to be worried.
If Unity continues being the trustworthy option that will always have fair and reasonable prices with an open TOS, then you can understand why I’m kinda pushing for Unity to handle it as a paid service… I don’t have the brain space to run my own servers for … well, anything. Been there, done that, lost more money than I saved.
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No one mentioned Firebase as an alternative? I think the pricing has been very consistent and granular enough so far with just enough abstraction. You are not directly getting inventory, scoreboards, etc. … but I like the pricing page that you can feel what you are going to pay as you code your game. I once tried GameSparks and PlayFab, too many hidden rules and costs to worry about. (By hidden it is very deep in the settings page only visible once you registered and start using it, not mentioned at all in pricing page)
EDIT some random calculations : The new GameSparks pricing seems to be either fixed 300$ per month or $0.008 per MAU over 38000 MAU, which means you can think that the indie free 100k MAU has been reduced to 38k. (?)
Before : Free 100k + 0.02$/MAU
After : Free 38k + 0.008$/MAU
- In the new plan, it takes 80k MAU to cost the same as monthly fixed 300$.
- Before, to cost 300$ for indie tier it takes 100k + (300 / 0.02) = 115k MAU
- So if you have more than 115k MAU and go monthly fixed 300$, the new plan is cheaper than old indie plan. (?)
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Those are kiiinda big reasons people were using services like Gamesparks in the first place.
You’re misunderstanding the new pricing chart. It’s not $300 OR $0.008 per MAU over 38K. It’s $300 AND $0.008 per MAU over 38K. You don’t receive anything for free. Below is a quote from the FAQ (https://www.gamesparks.com/pricing/faqs/).
Once again with the new plan it’s now $800 ($299 base plus $501 for the remaining 62625 MAUs) for the same quantity of MAUs that you got completely free through the old plan. Plus that $299 is on a per game basis.
Ok I have read the FAQ and it seems to be as you said. Uhhh that’s absurdly pricey I am not sure anyone sane will pay for… especially games that have to try to acquire users first then monetize later, that kind of strategy will ramp up MAU fast and imagine what the cost will be even before you can get anything back. Those users mostly would likely touch just the auth/register part of the service.
What is anyone’s opinion of SmartFoxServer?
I’ve literally never heard of them or anyone using them.
edit: looking into them, I see like… three titles I recognise, two of them not even active anymore.
edit 2: I see it powered Club Penguin but Club Penguin’s servers could run on a series of networked toasters so I can’t really draw anything from that.
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