From the pricing page, we have:
I just want to make sure I understand. Is this saying that, we should try to limit, per user, the amount of calls made to the leaderboards API to both fetch and send scores per month?
So for example, I try to implement my leaderboards system such that, a person playing my game would not push or pull scores to/from the leaderboard more than 500 times per month.
Am I correct in my understanding? Any help would be appreciated.
Hi, did you get any more information on this? We would be interested in that too.
Hi there! I can confirm yes, that’s the correct understanding.
We’ve not started billing for Leaderboards yet, and I don’t think we’ve published details about what the implications would be for going over the recommended usage, but it’s attempting to steer people not create things that perform read/write operations unnecessarily (e.g. inside a game loop, which has been something we’ve seen with other services).
The wording (“We ask you on average to restrict usage to”…) is intended to be guidance, as there isn’t a hard limit, but with a pricing model based on Monthly Active Usage (rather than billed per request) we wanted to set out some example of what might be reasonable usage, based on typical player engagement - while understanding that different games will have different usage patterns.
If you find any of the limits – e.g. of number of requests per month or number of total leaderboards (etc) – are inhibiting, feedback on that would be appreciated. I think in terms of this specific limit we’ve discussed maybe increasing it as we are seeing folks go a bit over it, but not in a way that has been problematic (e.g. a few games are making 1000-2000 calls a month per MAU; and that’s been fine).
That’s not a problem necessarily, and neither is having more active leaderboards than the guidance suggests, but doing both together could be and it’s a challenge to communicate that sentiment in a clear way. So far nobody has done anything problematic with it so if you do something reasonable, even if it’s a bit unusual, it’s probably going to be fine, but I’m very happy to discuss specific use cases if that would reassure anyone.
One thing to note that may not be immediately obvious is that the “calls per MAU” limits factor in common player engagement behaviour. For example, players that play once and never play again will maybe trigger < 10 calls to the service, while some players may be really engaged and end up triggering 1000 calls to the service in a month through normal gameplay. This would average out to around 500 calls a month per player. Not every player will be at an extreme, but I give that as an example as if a lot of folks are somewhere in the middle then it won’t matter if there are a small number of more engaged players who are outliers that trigger a lot more calls.
Our use-case is perhaps a bit unusual – we are a level-based game, and each level has three leaderboards that get scores if the player completes the level. We have 170 levels in the game.
So 50 boards would work out to about 16 levels for us, which the average player probably exceeds.
Any clarity on how strict this limit is, or how overages would be handled is appreciated.
EDIT: I estimate we would end up with about 100 boards for the average user
Thanks for the context!
I suspect that would be fine if the usage is otherwise not problematic in some unexpected way, but I’m keeping a note of this use case to help inform how we might account for this in future so we can be more explicit about how different use cases like this are handled and will follow up with more clarity when I have it!
All I can say for now is that Leaderboards is still free to use and we currently have no plans to add a hard cap for this or to start applying overages on Leaderboards in cases where people might technically go outside the MAU but in a way that isn’t problematic.
I’ll keep trying to get clarity on this and will follow up if there is anything more I can share, but please free to ask again about this again in future.
Hi – we are at the point of making a decision on whether to proceed with Unity Leaderboards. Is the current plan to still treat the 500 calls per MAU (and 50 boards per MAU) as guidelines for an “average” user, and not as hard limits?