Firebase vs Playfab vs Gamesparks?

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'm a big Gamesparks fanboy, been using it for two years now, and the more I use it, the more I fall in love with it.

You could implement the offline/caching thing if you wanted to, although you'd need to create your own client-side store to manage this.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

 

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.

https://docs.gamesparks.com/tutorials/game-engine-integrations/using-the-setdurable-parameter.html

 

Thanks for the reply guys. It definitely seems like Gamesparks is more suited towards my needs, will keep you posted.

 

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.

 

Gamesparks offers the first 10 000 MAU for free.

 

They increased it last year. It's 100 000 MAU now.

 

Oh cool, I need to come out from under my rock more often.

I'm loving their new portal though, have you used it?

 

No. Only just recently found out about it. Kinda like the change to MAU. Only learned about it from the front page I rarely visit.

 

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.

 

Gamesparks has just released their new portal, the difference is night and day from the old one.

 

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.

 

I'm in Auckland and it works well for me. Maybe that dodgy Wellington internet is letting you down

 

I'm based in Melbourne now, but yeah, Aus internet is terrible compared to NZ...

 

Especially if you use our new Dark Theme! =D

 

I have tried both PlayFab and GameSparks.

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.

 

Hi SweatyChair,

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.

I'm glad you're looking to stick with GameSparks. With regards to analytics, we're currently working on a significant overhaul of the GameSparks analytics suite, and we've also recently added the API stream - https://docs.gamesparks.com/documentation/analytics/api-stream-analytics.html

Clare

 

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 .

 

Hi @yaffa

We unfortunately do not have a unity video series, however, we do have some documentation to help Devs get started - https://docs.gamesparks.com/getting-started/creating-a-game/unity-setup.html

However, if you want more information about how GameSparks can work for you game specifically or if you need any help with any of our documentation, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our support team via https://support.gamesparks.net/support/home and we'd be happy to help in any way we can!

Clare

 

@GameSparks_Clare

Hello, what would you call these: https://docs.gamesparks.net/tutorials/unity-tutorials-challenges-part-1-introduction if not Unity Tutorials? I found these to be good ones, just to get "into" it. The only issue I have with them, is that they don't introduce the use of the Messages API which is kinda "crucial" to showing the real potential of the Tic Tac Toe example.

 

Hi @Maisey

Sorry for the delay in getting back to your message. That link is to our old docs site which should redirect your to our new docs site - https://docs.gamesparks.com/ I alerted one of our team members and so we can look at why the redirect mentioned at the top of the page is not working.

These videos are outdated, as you say some things are not covered, and we no longer share them with users because of this. I would advise against using the older documents and only use updated docs site and contact our support team if you need any assistance.

Thank you for alerting me to this issue.
Clare

 

I understand @GameSparks_Clare ! However, I found these videos better than none.

 

why nobody even talk about Firebase? only SweatyChair had worked whith it?

 

@tyapichu you can only build games just for android and ios you cant even build for WebGL (using unity of course) !!!
check this out:

 

@Turkm thanks. That's realy important...

 

the problem with playfab is how restricted the API, feels uncomplete on most part, gamespark much more polished and ready, but i just hope they offer unrestricted free basic feature just like how playfab did

 

I used Gamesparks for Social Login, Achievements, Leaderboards on one game. I can say its is fast and didnt experience any service related issue. Cloud Code is scripting language which is actualy Javascript and you will be access to all request and responses to alter them, plus you can create your own events.

Documentation is not the best i agree, but you can always open a support ticket, the answered faster than i expected.

 

any good tutorials please

 

they updated their tutorials recently: https://docs.gamesparks.com/tutorials/

 

Gamesparks has real issues with GDPR compliance. This is what they provide: https://docs.gamesparks.com/documentation/key-concepts/player-data-management.html and it does not fit all data privacy regulations. So if you are seated in Europe or have customers there, then Gamesparks might not be the right choice, yet.

You'll find discussions here: https://support.gamesparks.net/support/discussions/topics/1000088433

I loved Gamesparks for its simplicity but now I am afraid of the lack of GDPR compliance. What a pity...

Currently moving to Firebase. Seems to fit all needs, but is not that easy to develop.

@any Gamesparks employee: as I heard you were bought by AWS, they know about GDPR stuff quite well. Please provide your future plans especially the European regulations... What I saw in your player data management documentation above will not work for us!

 

@Rainking
could you explain what requirement of GDPR is not covered ? you can delete any player data in one api call

 

I used Gamesparks for one project and when searching for help on the community I found that many of the support answers on the docs were to contact support.

Found that Playfab has a very much clear UI and the documentation is more complete as of today.

I'm currently weighing my options between Playfab and Gamesparks, but right now Playfab is taking the lead.

 

I'm trying GameSparks, and yes, the documents & Support could be better, after so many years, I expected a more complete documentation and more examples... still trying to understand if they provide any offline authentication?

 

I'm using PlayFab for these past couple of weeks and I found that:

1. The web is much more organized and easy to use
2. The web is much more responsive and fast
3. Documentation is much better and the support is really active
4. Lots of ready made functionalities.

 

Hey guys, has anyone checked out ChilliConnect yet? We are a Live Game Management platform that encompasses a host of Game Backend Services, LiveOps capability for social and connected gaming and we also have an Analytics dashboard built in so you can track all the key metrics you need during your development and live phases. ChilliConnect is a good alternative to Gamesparks and Playfab if you've not used anything before and want to try out a few things before making your choice. We also have an API Explorer tool which you can use to get a feel for ChilliConnect without actually integrating it in to your game. https://www.chilliconnect.com/

 

Guys, I have a Unity game that needs a backend server but not sure if any of these options will work for me. I need something that allows me to write some code on the server that takes what the client sends it via TCP/IP, runs some code on the data then sends the answer back to the client. I also need something that is continually running, and every 5 or 10 seconds broadcasts to all the connected clients some data. it also needs to maintain a user database which currently I do on a php web server but i'd like to merge this functionality with the bit I mentioned above.

any ideas?

 

PlayFab all the way

 

Hi how much I should pay for gametpekers because I don't understand the price plan for them if my game have 100K from users?

 

You pay both per month and per MAU (Monthly Active User).

Since the first 37,375 MAUs per month are free you only calculate the remaining MAUs. Therefore $0.008 times 62,625 (100,000 minus 37,375) making a total of $501. Add $299 on to that and you're left with a total of $800 per month.

 

Any now they are acquired by Unity. hello!
Lets see what goodies this brings.

 

GameSparks is closing :-( The service was very convenient! And most importantly available from China.They promise migration to AWS https://pages.awscloud.com/GLOBAL-ln-DL-IMM-ISC-GMT-gamesparks-2021-learn.html, but it is not available in China

 

Yeah I saw this coming for a long time. Got the email yesterday morning. I have over 200 hours of integration work/server-side code invested in Gamesparks, and now I need to migrate it to another platform.

My game is in beta/soft-launch stage so now is probably the right time to do it. It throws a serious spanner in the works though and will put me back by at least 8 weeks.

 

Amazon buying the company was the sign everyone needed to start looking into alternatives.

 

I recommend looking into https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/services-games for a free and well supported backend.

 

I recommend you check this out before making a final decision.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x0eok6EZzigar_K3QNdzTYNhp5NLywLGqBuopKiVzao/edit#gid=0

 

I ended up migrating to Playfab. It was about 200 hours of work, but now that I've moved over I'm very happy I did.

It has a bunch of very useful LiveOps tools compared to Gamesparks. And I have much better visibility of what is going on in my game.

And being able to write all my server logic in C# with Azure Functions, which can call back into a Playfab API is an amazing workflow.

 

Yeah to me depending on the project it's honestly between firebase and playfab.. and playfab has a huge reach in community, integrations and documentation. It's been like squeezing milk out of dry ice trying to get custom authentication rolling with firebase considering how sparse the info is on specific platforms and actual useful examples.
Really considering making the move myself. (not a huge fan of the pay per minute rather MAU.. who cares it's a free dev period.

Edit; Made the move.. took me, I kid you not a copy and paste from their JUICY documentation to get where I had been trying to with firebase WITH direct discord help for 2 days.
All I wanted was to create and enter a user based on their authorized steam ID.. now I find you can literally do that in a single API call in playfab and it **just works**..
(SignInWithCustomAuth was what I was trying for any firebase guys..I'm sure it's simple too)
Though speaking with a "firebase expert" you had to work in the database first which.. ok

I may be slow, or maybe firebase just wasn't for me (a bit of both).
In any case, happy with the move couldn't recommend it enough.

 

@DJ_Design I read the doc you shared about the BAAS.It has a lot of interesting infos although seems a bit old (it seems updated up to 2020).
I was considering a BAAS for my mobile games to add features like cross platform authentication, cross platform realtime multiplayer and some kind of social interaction between players. I also would like to update the game with some live content management (adding content to the game without the need to update it).
Beamable supports it, but doesn't seems to be possible to update the game with content like a new 3D model. Beamable also seems very simple and straightforward, very much unity oriented. Now it seems that it supports also real time multiplayer, not only turn based multiplayer. Do you think that beamable is suitable for the this kind of use case?
Im also considering acceleratXR and braincloud. My concern with these (relatively) new services is that we dont know if they are going to stay in business for a long time (like gamespark) so an alternative like playfab, backed up by microsoft can be a more "secure" choose.