Registering game account with purchase, cross-platform, friend list, etc.

Hey guys,

I'm working on a multiplayer arena game and I'd like to hear some ideas or recommendations about something I plan to implement.

The networking is done with using the Photon Cloud service, matchmaking is going to be random based on my custom matchmaking logic. To let players play with their friends instead of playing with random people all the time, i'll have to create an account system using SQL database to store the information about players.

So my questions are:

1.) What is a good and reliable payment processor which will let me to pass the customers e-mail address and password to my database on purchase, so they can use it as their actual game account to log in to the game?

2.) As the game is going to be cross-platform, and I target android as well, I think I don't want it to be a paid game there (not sure if this is a good idea). If I make this free on android, what would be the best way to handle this? Only idea that came into my mind is letting the PC version owners to log in to their accounts from android as well, and those who don't own the game couldn't use the friend list function until they register an account on their android devices which would be an IAP. Android users who made a purchase on their phones could also play the PC version with their accounts, and the IAP price would be the same as the PC price. I'm a bit lost, and I might overcomplicate things. How would you go about this?

 

you might want to check Playfab.com as you are using photon they are both working well together, you can have a virtual currency when player buy an IAP from whatever service, then decrease this currency on playfab

 

Nice, I didn't know about this service, it will come handy, thanks! I have one question, can I implement something like player account generation when they purchase the actual game on my website? I only plan in app registration for mobile, for PC users I want them to generate their accounts at purchase, so they can log in to the game with those accounts once they download the game. Thanks!

 

you could do that yes, when user launch game for the first time, use playerprefs to check if the string "accountName" exist, if not you generate a random name and register in the background without email, then later when user want to register just edit its account and add details, there is a game that do it on mobile: galaxy on fire Alliances

 

This is not exactly what I need. I want the players to make the purchase out of the game (on the website) and then let them download the game and log in with their e-mail and password which they filled in at purchase. Can I pass these information to the Playfab database and use it for logging in in the game?

 

you might see this with the devs of playfab, it would be easy to do a webplayer for purchase stuff, but if its using ony a website i have no idea

 

Alright, thanks. I think i'll use playfab for my game but still not sure about how should I sell it. Make it a free but limited game, and unlock features like playing with friends, more gamemodes, etc. for paid users... hopefully it works.

 

For those who are interested, the conversation around this continues in the PlayFab forums, here: https://support.playfab.com/discussions/topics/1000055219.

@martin999b (and everyone else), based on this thread, I should also point out that we also have the ability to generate keys which can be used for unlocking in-game items, as well as for unlocking the game itself. That latter functionality isn't exposed in our public SDK currently, but was used for Planetary Annihilation. We do have this on our roadmap for refactoring, to make it part of the public set, so if that's something you would need, feel free to reach out to us at devrel@playfab.com to talk about what your key dates are.