Send player data over web to my local PC?

Hello,

I am an experienced game dev, but not experienced in saving player data. What I would like to do is take some basic metrics like Time Played, Game Session Length, Types of Items Used, and send them to some sort of human-readable format on my PC. Of course, I would like these to update in real-time, or periodically.

Does this have to do with databases? Or backends? Is this something I would use MySQL for?
Looking online I see posts about hosting your own web server, is that necessary?

Thank you,
Alex

 

You could certainly use your own PHP/MySQL server for this sort of thing. The game contacts the server and sends relevant data, and you can then query the database when you want to view the data. I'd probably use Unity Analytics unless I had a specific reason not to though.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UnityAnalytics.html

 

Awesome thanks Joe, I think I'll look into Analytics, great link!

 

One straightforward way to save data is using the JSON format—this is a popular, human readable standard. Google offers a service called Firebase that uses JSON databases that might fit your requirements.