Heads Up - Gamesparks changed their pricing plan and it's looking bad for indies.

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/

 

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.

 

Just when I'm finishing my game they take realtime and matchmaking out of the standard plan.

 

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/

 

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?)

 

What about Apache Usergrid?

http://usergrid.apache.org/

 

I've heard good things about Nakama which is open source and has Unity support - https://heroiclabs.com/

 

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

 

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.

 

Well this sucks ass. Guess I'm going to have to migrate my current project to Nakama or something.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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. (?)

 

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.

 

Didn't' realize there was a thread on this over here. Posting my thoughts from the connect games thread and some further questions.

I'm using GameSparks at the moment but only have minimal integration at this point. I am looking into alternatives before I move forward.

If your game can hit the 37k monthly active users it looks like GamesSparks would be cheaper than PlayFab ($299/month + $0.008 per MAU). If I understand PlayFab's pricing correctly you don't get any MAU included in that initial $299? So you will end up paying $595+ for PlayFab vs $299 for GameSparks?

Unfortunately if you can't hit that 37k MAU that's a bunch of wasted money and probably prices out most indies. I really liked having a pure MAU or API call based rate that scaled with users.

Does anyone know how Heroic Labs Nakama scales if you go the open source route? I can't find any information on how many estimated users a single droplet could manage? Looks like scaling is only mentioned if you use their Enterprise / Managed services which are pricier than the alternatives. Is there a way to scale across multiple droplets?

PlayFab free tier is looking mighty tempting if you don't need the additional features. My worry with this is if they drop their free tier or change the pricing and end up in the same situation. I don't mind paying for CCU or MAU, even if its more expensive, but the additional monthly cost hits hard if you end up not having the user base to support it.

 

Does anyone have a solution for file uploads and retrieval and storing player data against the file?
I have looked around and either I don't see it or it's called something else.
I need to move away from GS now

 

You should reach out to support (if you haven't done that already). I sent them a request to keep using those features and they granted it.

I know you probably want an online solution for this but you could use this a binary formatter and save to application persistent path. It's easy to set up and you can add base64 so people have to work a little harder to cheat.

 

I actually use that but I also need to share files between users. That's specifically why I need it online.
Thanks

 

If the content you want to share is small (< 1MB) then you can use Firebase Cloud Firestore or AWS DynamoDB, DocumentDB. I am building my save backup system on Firestore currently. It supports byte type by base-64 string. I haven't touch AWS for very long time since I moved out.

If your user generated content is larger, Firebase has a generic storage called Firebase Storage. AWS has a generic storage called S3.

The generic storage solution has expensive upload, but cheap download. Probably worth it if they are GBs of data that lean towards download. But that's usually not what your user had generated, so the upload only comes from you and downloaded by players.

 

I got the impression that scaling is a paid feature, and you're probably limited to a single server if you use the open source components alone? But it didn't seem all that clear.

Last time I looked (admittedly, quite a long time ago), there was no real web dashboard as part of the open source version, either. After getting used to the user-friendliness of the GameSparks dashboard and features such as the debugger and test harness, it felt very bare-bones.

But then again, the ability to self-host a single server with open-source software, probably fits the needs of many indie games

And it must have been at least 1-2 years ago since I looked at it, things may well have changed since then?

 

Another option is: https://getbraincloud.com/

They are small, but they are backed by a larger company and have a public commitment to not being acquired or shutdown ( https://getbraincloud.com/apidocs/parse-and-who-can-you-trust/ ). Despite being small they have a pretty nice service, fast support via chat app and have hosted some pretty big games (Simpsons Tapped Out being the biggest and Tony Hawk Skate Jam the most recent).

 

What about Amazon pricing ?

 

I have chatted with them a bit since the announcement and was told scaling is possible with the open source component. It was recommended to hook up a load balancer to direct to multiple droplets. But the more I think about this I'm not sure how this would share data across droplets. Maybe there is a mechanism there or maybe the bottle neck is just traffic idk.

They do have benchmarks located here if anyone is interested.

I'd would also be interested if anyone is using AWS alternatives. From what I looked at previously it seemed you would need use multiple different AWS services, and each alone could potentially be more expensive that GameSparks as a whole.

 

Do note that the new pricing from Gamesparks only applies to new agreements signed from hereon. If you previously signed an agreement with them on the older indie tier or other tier that old pricing still applies.

 

Reading between the lines, and looking at the current trends, they appear to want to be the one tool to rule them all, regardless of domain. In a world of finite resources and potentially billions of users among all possible industries, games may end up being more of a hook to attract people to exploring the tool as a hobby, then discovering that they suddenly know how to use a tool that has become an industry standard in {newIndustry} that just converged on Unity as its client side content and media pipeline.

 

Yeah I dunno if Unity's apparel line is a solid threat to the Kardashians yet though.

 

Yeah. I'm in the same position. Now I have to port all my cloud code to PF and Photon which all told will be around $300 a month as well.

 

Looks like PlayFab might not be a viable solution for me. Apparently they have issues with Http requests in cloud script that prevents communication with AWS. If anyone has working AWS Requests with PlayFab please let me know.

Looking at more alternatives...Does anyone have any experience with https://www.chilliconnect.com/ This is the first I've heard of them but their pricing seems very competitive if you are looking for an indie license.

 

But wait, if they are partnering with a big company like Amazon, couldn't they create a better business model to help their clients?

 

It's a buyout not a partnership. Amazon is most likely the one that called for this and if I had to guess why it would be to drive people to AWS.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon bought them out primarily just to keep anyone else from doing so. With everything else really being secondary.

 

How did you contact them?, cause support is not available for the Indie tier, and i'm afraid that if i submit a ticket through https://support.gamesparks.net/support/home they'll just ignore me.

 

GameSparks is obviously too expensive.
Nakama managed cloud pricing is 10 times more absurd as it is $600 for a small server that will handle only small amounts of users.
Their opensource version is for the most part useless as it can't be scaled in clusters, only single instance. Also you will need to optimize their server as it sends a lot of garbage that increases server load a lot without any use to most of the games. And their DB is cockroach that only a few people on the planet really know how to handle well.

Firebase requires to build all functionality from scratch, but only they have reasonable pricing.

All other options I found out there just look like they can disappear any day from the market.

In general, the situation in BaaS for your game is very, very sad.
The best option is to stick with Firebase and build your functionality on top.

 

I think I responded to you on reddit haha. Just submit a ticket and see what happens. At worst they won't respond, but they will probably respond after a few days (atleast that was my experience).

 

Haha, small world. I saw your reply on reddit, They responded to me, but i'm migrating to Firebase anyway, their current limits simply don't make much sense.

 

Game sparks replaced their mongo support with their data types which is basically dynamodb.
Also while they have real-time services they are not as versatile as photon.
I just recently ported my latest prototype to photon from gamesparks realtime.
I have been using gamesparks for a while and was locked in to some earlier deals.
It’s a shame there have been so many changes because they originally offered a great service.

As others have mentioned I will most likely move to developing my own services more directly on aws.

 

Hey,
Guys, there is 'indie studio' plan in playFab which cost $99 for100K mau.....
so 100K/$100 = 1000MAU
so 1$ =1000 MAU
so 1 MAU cost $1/1000MAU = 0.001

from there FAQ

How does PlayFab’s Indie Tier work, and does my game qualify?

PlayFab is offering a new Indie Tier on a limited basis. It's limited to small developers (no more than 5 seats) who are truly going it alone - no publisher deals please! - whose titles have no more than 100,000 MAU. If you are on the Indie tier and your game breaks out, we will simply move you over to the Pro tier once your title no longer qualifies for Indie status.

 

PlayFab would have been enticing but I happened to watch the Epic Games GDC Keynote out of boredom and one major announcement was for an online services solution that is completely free. Supports any game engine, any store, and any platform.

https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/services

 

@Ryiah did they mention anything about real-time networking or relays? Looking at the link I didn’t see anything mentioning it.
Seems like it is peripheral devices. Maybe the networking is already available.

 

Nothing beyond what is already covered by the webpage. That said matchmaking wouldn't be complete without relays and the former is mentioned as one of the features coming later this year.

 

Idk what op is smoking, currently the pricing is 100ccu for free, and 299 for the standard, which is exactly the same pricing as playfab.. considering photon is 20ccu, if that's not "indie friendly" what is exactly.

 

Well, the post was made on Februrary, 8 months ago. So, maybe something changed since.

But, as far as I could read on their page. The 100 ccu is only for the preview environment with none for live environment (at least it is empty for me). Which is not weird cosidering it is the "Development" tier.

The following tier, or "Standard", costs $299 with 10000 ccu (plus the $0.008 per MAU after 37,375) for live and the same 100 ccu for preview.

 

It's about the limits https://www.gamesparks.com/fair-usage-policy/, they are very restrictive for the indie tier

 

Only for development. Once you release you no longer qualify for that tier.

Microsoft Azure PlayFab has two tiers available. One for $99/mo that allows you to have up to 100,000 MAUs and one that is $299/mo plus $0.008 MAU with the first 1,000 MAUs free. That first paid tier is a massive difference for indie developers because it allows you to grow your game before you pay full price making it very affordable.

https://playfab.com/pricing/#pricing_details_all

Photon's 20 CCU free tier is intended to be used for development too, and while they don't cut access to it if you release your game the free tier has no scaling at all and the paid tiers are very expensive. Photon is only worthwhile if you need a multiplayer framework. Otherwise it's the most expensive of the three.