Multiplayer Developers: The reason I moved from GameSparks to PlayFab

Hey there gentlemen, and fellow developers,
I want to shed some light on multiplayer cloud BaaS providers for you indie game developers out there.

Just Moved to PlayFab after realizing that GameSpark's pricing sucks.

PlayFab gives "Indie Developers" pricing tier that costs 99$/month and is up to 100K players.
Gamesparks on the other hand offer absolutely NO "Indie Support" and cost 299$/month for 37K players. (0.008$ for any MAU beyond that)

Colclusion:
Doing the math, for indie game developers GameSparks is 9 TIMES (hope that's big enough) more expansive than playfab.
So goodbye Gamesparks, and hope you get your heads out of your b#tts, if you wish to keep your developers.

PlayFab:


GameSparks:

 

You think I'm PlayFab?
No I actually used GameSparks in my project, code is still with GameSparks SDK.
Re-writing it for PlayFab probably in the coming week

 

yeah, deleted my initial response thinking you were advertising.

 

Oh, no..
Look at my posts history, I'm an actual indie developer going through
the dilema for choosing a proper BaaS

 

It's a shame, gamesparks used to be pretty good, but then they did some huge pricing model change.

 

I knew about GameSparks being bought up and having their prices jacked up to the point no one should use them.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/hea...g-plan-and-its-looking-bad-for-indies.632257/

What I didn't know was that Microsoft bought up PlayFab. Very interesting to see them hold onto the same pricing tiers.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/20...celerating-game-development-innovation-cloud/

 

That caught me off guard a few weeks ago as well. I wasn't sure if they also turned into a "badguy". I'm still going to favor PlayFab for my game once I get to that point in a couple of years, especially since I did most of my research and tests with PlayFab. Who knows though. In a couple of years, it'll be something else. I think, it'd probably be best to build your multiplayer infrastructure choosing something, anything, and then migrating to the best solution as you get closer to launch.

 

Microsoft for some reason has for years restrained their monetization of indie developers. It has done a lot to boost my opinion of the company.

 

Microsoft have for a very long time now been the good guys. Contributed to open source for a long time etc.

They bought Simplygon and made the license even better for indies etc, etc.

 

You've done some selective cropping there! After 100k users the Playfab pricing is almost the same as GameSparks pricing. From right next to the stuff in your own screen snip:


It is about ~90% cheaper to use Playfab, but only if you qualify for their indie package and have less than 100k monthly players.

Either way, if your game reaches large scale you're looking at about one cent per user. Sure, for the first 100k users I'd rather keep most of that cent rather than give it to a vendor, so I'd take that into consideration, but it wouldn't necessarily outweigh other concerns like how reliable the systems are, the feature sets they offer, how privacy is handled, and how easy they are to work with.

Edit: As someone who has briefly dabbled with both, Playfab was super simple to get running and had fantastic support. I didn't spend enough time with GameSparks to get a solid impression.

 

Of course I have done selective cropping, because indie studios support is the issue I wanted to talk about.
This thread is not at all complaining about large scaling.
This thread is about the stage most of us indie game developers will be in (Under 100k MAU).
The ONLY thing that is being criticized here in this thread is how far the BaaS is willing to go for indie devs, which in GameSparks case is 0.

 

New Turnout! Starting to implement PlayFab into my game, I have discovered that PlayFab doesn't have a socket to the client. So sending a joinLobbyRequest to a friend will have to be through Push-Notification...
Receiving Real-time messages is a big factor in my game, so PlayFab users, can you shed some light on how connection between the server and the clients is happening?
Thank you!

 

Probably better making a new post for that as you wont get many replies here in a thread made for different purpose