Unsure about which backend gaming cloud service to choose.

I have a mobile game that is mostly offline with a few small online components. The scores that you attain within the offline game are infrequently sent to a server where they are combined with a database of other players scores. This is then used to produce simple HTML league tables that are sent to the clients game. The amount of data is quite small and quite infrequent, certainly nowhere near real-time.
This data will be encrypted and accessed via a Username and Password.
Initially the game will be on Android but will grow to iOS and possibly desktop OSs.

PlayFab / Gamesparks seems to be over the top. I don't need matchmaking, lobbies, real-time data etc. All I need is really a web server and a database and authentication. All nicely protected against DDOS attacks.

Firebase.. well that confuses the hell out of me as to what it actually is..

So I'm going to assume that a "normal" Amazon/MS/Google cloud service would work more cost effectively than PlayFab /Gameparks . Is this assumption correct and which tier would work the best when cost cutting as much as possible.

(PS I don't want the hassle of spinning up my own server for a few reasons)

 

PlayFab is completely free until you hit 100,000 players. After that everything is priced similarly to any other cloud service but with the bonus that it's tailored specifically for games whereas other services will be very generic.

If you want to eliminate cost entirely while maintaining cross-platform support Epic Online Services is free.

https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/services

Alternatively if you don't mind losing cross-platform support you can hook up the free platform services.

https://developer.apple.com/game-center/
https://developers.google.com/games/services/
https://partner.steamgames.com/

 

Epic Online Services is interesting, and ironic that it works with Unity. I don't suppose integrating that into an Android game will cause issues with the game being distributed on Google Play Store by any chance that you know of?

Also any helper addons for Unity with this would be useful like the Google Plat Store one.

Do Epic and Playfabs support custom server functionality/code or are you limited to just customising their "modules"?
Because I have leagues in my game that are not completely straightforward in nature. Google Play Services leaderboards for example are too simplified and restrictive for what I need. I'd need to be able to write code against a database or have much more customisable leaderboard so that it can have several fields, icons and also it will automatically reset every week/month/season as my game has a few different leagues that automatically reset at the start of a new window and sometimes use multiple stats like a football/soccer league table .

Thanks.

 

@Ryiah
It looks like you can make custom stats on leaderboards in EoS, which might work. It also lets leaderboards expire after a certain time. However it does not let me automatically reset the league every day/week etc.

So I either have to manually reset multiple leagues (which isn't an option) or I need to write custom code as far as I can tell. Unless there's also some sort of automatic/scripting backend that I can use to trigger a wipe of the leagues assuming it has an API to do that.

 

I would probably do that with a azure or amazon cloud service. You pay for what you use and if you send low amount of data it will not cost that much.

 

This is what I've been thinking in the back of my mind from the start, but a lot of people keep suggesting these more game orientated services. Thing is my use case is really simply but immediately seems to not be able to be fulfilled with any current game service out there.
The really hard part is trying to guesstimate how much actual data will be used and then equate that to the vastly overcomplicated pricing schemes.

 

Yeah, the cloud model in that sense is a bit scary. But if you bench your "netcode" you should be able to get a fairly good estimate.

I can also recommend Microsoft identity server for authentication, it works very well.