Hi all, James Gwertzman here, I’m the CEO of PlayFab. I’m really glad to hear you’re trying us out – that makes us happy. I’ve been in the game industry for 15 years, most recently at PopCap, but before PopCap I ran my own indie game studio (Sprout Games) for several years, and so I know what it’s like to be small. We had just 3 full-time employees, all co-founders, and out motto back then was “spend no money”.
That said, I still think PlayFab is a great deal, especially if you consider all the hidden costs. I would absolutely have used PlayFab back at Sprout if it had existed back then.
The biggest cost savings is for all the up-front engineering work we’ve already done. You can implement a basic leaderboard with PHP in a few days, but duplicating everything we provide would take you several years worth of work – and by then we would have already built a ton more features since this is all we do.
We have 12 people who do nothing but focus on building the most complete game operations platform in the world. And 100% of that platform is available to you immediately, without paying anything until your game goes live. And that right there is pretty huge — it means you can start using all these features from the very first day of prototyping your new game, and focus all your energy on your game.
This matters because designing and building services that scale is really hard. We wrote this blog post about just this topic. A simple PHP script on a $100/year server using mySql can certainly handle some traffic, maybe even 2,000 DAU, but probably not much more than that. The problem with storing a leaderboard in a relational database is that most databases are designed for many more reads than writes — writes are typically very expensive, because they often need to lock the table. But games are the opposite – they do many more writes than reads, usually. So even a tiny amount of traffic can quickly thrash your performance and even crash your server.
And users don’t like it when your game crashes – they may never come back. And with the high cost of acquiring customers, if you’re paying $2/user to acquire customers (that’s a pretty typical cost-to-acquire a new user), then suddenly paying $0.002 per day to keep that user happy with a rock-solid platform starts to seem pretty attractive 
Also there’s the cost of managing the server… What % of your time is spent reviewing server logs, backing up data, tuning performance, adding more servers as your game scales up, etc. That can quickly become a full-time job once your game is live, and that’s time you’re not spending on your game itself.
Finally there’s the cost of the tools… that’s actually where we are spending most of our time these days, building better tools for actually operating your game once it goes live. The Game Manager that’s live on PlayFab today is version 1… version 2 is coming soon and it’s a huge improvement. It’s got features people are asking for like permissions and roles, full editing of player profiles, full audit logs (so you know what changed in your game), real-time in-game-item catalog editing, and much more.
Building great tools takes time, and if you don’t have good tools then when someone calls you up with a customer service problem you’re going to have to do a manual SQL query to resolve their issue – and that’s more time you’re not spending on your game
Also, it’s not true that you can’t use our in-game item-purchase system with games on iOS. It’s true that you have to use Apple’s system for real-money transactions, but that just means you need to sell your bag of 10,000 gold coins for $5 through Apple. Once that transaction goes through, you give us the receipt from Apple, we verify the receipt to make sure it’s not a fraud (that’s another feature that you’d have to build yourself – receipt verification), we credit the player’s account with the 10,000 gold coins, and then from that point forward all their in-game transactions happen using the PlayFab system.
And with our system, you have full control to manage the in-game items after the game is already live, without having to re-submit anything to Apple. You can add items, remove items, change item properties, change item prices, etc. That sort of live updates are at the heart of live game operations.
Also we have a pretty decent analytics system built-in that doesn’t require any additional work to use – and we make it really easy to generate custom events. Today our built-in reporting tools are pretty basic, but we have a pretty awesome new analytics system coming soon that does all the operations most live games need, such as segmentation, cohorts, funnel analysis, custom queries, and more. And we’re thinking about what sort of stock reports we can provide out-of-the-box that actually help you operate your game more efficiently. Knowing your DAU is not actually that helpful. Seeing that your in-game revenue by 10AM is only 20% of where it was at 10AM exactly 7 days ago is much more helpful
Anyway… enough from me. We’re really, really passionate about building awesome technologies and tools for all of you, and we’re committed to building the best game operations platform. I want to hear from you – please email us at “devrel@playfab.com” – I read all mails we get on that alias, and so do most of our engineers.
