MBaaS (Backend Services)

Howdy everyone,

I was curious if anyone had used or researched using any MBaaS with your mobile development?

I've been eyeballing GameSpark lately and thinking it might be a good way to go, for a little indie studio. Could cut out a lot of work and make handling a lot of Xplatform stuff really easy - But, just wanted to see if anyone had given it a go.

I've seen Kii, Kumulos, GameSpark

Looks like GameSpark has a good Unity plugin already.

Thoughts?

 

Decided to give Scoreoid a go as well as have GameSpark on the radar.

I did native on our last apps, but that only covered Android/IOS and I hated having to update both codebases to for simple changes on messing, leader-boards. I like GameSpark with all it's social interaction, waiting to hear back from them; probably give it a go on our next game and Scoreoid for this current one.

 

Parse is worth a look, it's quite nice to use, and free to a certain point, and they have a Unity plugin in the AS.

However it can get expensive if you generate a lot (over 1 million/month) requests and you're not monetising them.

 

You can look into App42 Backend APIs for MBaaS services. It has lots of ready made backend services like User, Storage, Leaderboard, Reward, Buddy and list goes on. If you wan to use Push Notification along, you dont need to buy any plugin or something as it freely available.
Also, it has in-built analytics feature without any additional price.

 

After evaluating several solutions, I'm most likely going with GameSparks...

Main reasons...

- They support practically every platform that Unity supports. This is sorely lacking with many of the other offerings. A big one for me is We Player, WebGL, and of course Windows Store Apps and Windows Phone.

- Good C# coding support for their API's, using Action<> callbacks to handle responses.

- Nice NoSQL database and object manager, which can be queried through their events system and it lets you write your own custom events

- The ability to hook into their API events with your own custom code, or create your own custom API events, once you understand how this works, it's extremely powerful, they have a great javaScript code editor in their Game Manager for coding your custom events

- Extremely powerful game manager admin, its fully featured and really offers all you need, oine of my favourite features is their Test Harness, which allows you to test out your custom server code, and even pass to it built in API or custom events, once again, very powerful.

- Good support for built-in challenges, social networking, in app purchases and loads of other features, with support for more providers than most other offerings

- Good support and their community forums have got a good knowledge base going.