[POLL] Pricing a Highscores, Analytics, PlayerData service

Hi all,

due to a number of factors (primarily Playtomic dying a few days before my latest game was launched), I'm giving serious thought to creating an online service for game developers which provides the following:

• Highscores and Achievements
• Analytics
• Player Data (Saved games, etc)
• Game Data (Gameplay settings/news/etc)
• Player Levels (Store/share/rate player created levels)

The focus will be on providing a high availability cross-platform solution.

It's important to make some money from this, because without that revenue coming in theres no way to ensure the stability and ongoing support of the product. Would also be handy to line my own pockets *grins*

The pricing model I'm considering is a tiered approach based on the number of requests made by a given game. A FREE subscription level would provide enough requests for testing and to support a small player base (1000-5000 players depending on how many calls you make), after that you can increase your tier to pay for more players.

Pay as you go (PAYG) is another possibility.

Having different prices for different parts of the solution is also an option, although I would like to keep the pricing model as simple as possible.

So on to the poll:

How much would you pay? What pricing model would you prefer?

Cheers,

John A

PS Is there anything else you would like to see in such a service?

PPS Its a multichoice poll, click as many as apply

 

How about paying for actual resource usage, amount of data stored

 

Free for low usage, price negotiable for heavy users. From your perspective, don't underestimate the value of proving your API by giving it away. As you're really selling a service, it's very easy for you to track who is using it, how much, and how much they're paying you.

c.f. GameSpy and PlayerIO for similar services already available free or cheap for low volume users.

 

I hate pay-as-you-go type services, because you may end up vastly paying more than you originally thought because your game is more might have imagined.

 

I think PlayTomic closing it's doors tells you that niche is aptly covered.

You might try developing a High Score / Meeting Place portal for this Ouija Board / Android Console thing and have it ready in case that group fail to develop their own portal.

 

How about selling software to run this service on your own server as a side project?

 

That would be even a better path to success for you compared to developing something for these possible Ouija Board Consoles I think.

You'd need to develop scripts that save / transmit game state/deltas and then use this data variable names and structures to feed into a script to create the dB server and Meeting Portal.

Then create a document showing how to set it the db server up on a Amazon EC2 / Route 53 Windows Server instance for 0.51 cents a month.

I'd pay $500 for that kind of simplified and cheap game networking. I'm surprised Unity doesn't develop there networking further and sell the game server setup scripts or another $1500 Pro ad-on. It's certainly easier to add on then some of the other pro features added recently. It would be messier to support though, maybe that's why.

I've seen several game saving assets out there in the asset store maybe you can study how to do that in a general way and also study how Photon and these others networking game server groups use their own wrapper APIs to to accomplish this.

You've better be prepared to cluster the solution should a game using your solution ever become very successful.

 

Have you looked at Scoreoid, I'm one of the fonders check it out - http://scoreoid.net/

 

Take a look at what PlayerIO offers, and they offer a hell of a lot more than what you are..
http://playerio.com/pricing/

To be competivie, I think you would need to offer most of those options.

 

Or offer a tenth of the options, and be reliable and communicative.

 

Whenever I've dealt wtih PlayerIO their support has been superb and I've never had reliability issues.

 

While these services are quite nice, I wouldn't subscribe to them unless there was an option of purchasing and running the backend on one of my servers. I know this would cause more work on my part, and be possibly harder for the developer of the platform to find steady revenue, but thinking of myself; who is to say that one day the service provider doesn't close their doors and leave me looking for another service to integrate?

 

I've had their services fail without warning and for extended periods of time [once during a presentation of a prototype], and their ability to answer questions - esp. on their forums as appalling. Heck, I've got questions/bug reports from 2011 that are still unanswered!

 

I think it really depends on the service, we answer our support tickets with a couple of days at max. Most of the time within one day or less. As for reliability issues it really depends even if you host everything on your end it's possible for you to have issues just my personally Wordpress site was hacked some time ago.

There isn't the perfect solution and should always use whats best for you as the developer and your game.

Overall I believe working on the game and and not worrying about the other stuff but I'm bias started Scoreoid because it was a total pain to work on the other when I was developing games.

 

Old thread, but this is exactly what I'm doing now. Too many services to compete with. Instead I'm planning on a bunch of services that you can host yourself.

 

With or without sources?
What kind of licensing terms?
What unity-server solution does it integrate with?
What advertising network do you integrate with?

Do you have a CDN (content delivery) service and cross-platform APIs?
What about Flash integration and HTML5 REST APIs?

 

It's hosted on GAE (Google App Engine), you will need to set up your own GAE account, you are beholden to Google but chances are they will outlive your game. That said its JEE so porting wouldn't be too much of a hassle (one of the reason I chose GAE, the others being I know it well, and it has reasonable level of access for free).

Full Source.

Standard Asset Store terms, you can do whatever you want with it as long as you don't turn around and resell it as an asset.

Its not a solution for "live" networking, it doesn't integrate with a Unity Server solution, nor does it include advertising. Planned are High Scores, Analytics and "Generic Data" (i.e. levels data). Other things under consideration are chat/lobby system and a turn based game framework.Binary content was not planned, but its a good idea.

The API's are JSON/REST.

 

Have you taught about integrating user/account management into the package?
I am thinking user accounts created automatically for the UUID (IOS) with the option to link the account to an email/login.
That account would then store (XP, Level, Rank, Gold, Currency, Etc + Friend List to other accounts in the system)

Have a look at FlightControl Free or any of the Zynga Games.