Saving player's progress online

I'm developing a game that needs to save the progress of the player online and that might become multiplayer in the future.

I'm trying to understand what's the best thing to do in this situation considering that I'm on a low budget but completely available to build my own system.

People suggested me to build my own system as the prices of something like PUN are prohibitive. But considering all the stuff I have to build on my own I'm not even sure that building it on my own would give a great service to the final user because I need to consider maybe latency, maintain the servers, pay to rent the servers, and so on.

In summary, my main goal is to save the players' progress, and I'm so much more in favor of trying an external service to do so if it'is not too expensive. At the same time, I'm ready to build my own system.

What do you guys suggest? Do you know the name of some service that does what I'm looking for?

 

I just restarted working on a multiplayer database to save stuff and im going with a mysql database and using php scripts to communicate with the database so I can get items owned by certain users/add/remove them etc. Im pretty new to this still so can't really give much advice on it but thats what im going with.

This is the tuts I watched to get me started on it

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If you go this route, here's a good place to learn as well.
https://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp

 

consider building that sql direct connect only if you aim for ~100 - 200 ccu

else you could use gamespark which provide 100 k mau for free
or nakama which is open source, which will need you to host and could endup more expensive than services because they are pretty optimized on prices.

 

Thank you guys for the answers. Meanwhile, I've been trying Playfab. Looks great but still want to check what you suggested


Slaghton I'll first try an already made backend for games. Sounds crazy to make a new one from scratch so I'm already abandoning that idea

 

Hey! I am in a similar situation as you were, I really like to know what was your final choice.

 

Well, that thread is 4 years old, but I can assure that PlayFab still works great with saving and keeping users progress in cloud