Hi everyone,
We’ve made some big changes at PlayFab that should be interesting to folks on this forum. If you haven’t heard of us, PlayFab is a powerful and flexible backend platform for game operations.
PlayFab is now free. As of today, any game can use any or all of our core services, regardless of how many players, for free. This includes authentication, player profiles, cloud scripting, in-game commerce, content management, multiplayer matchmaking, leader boards, reporting, in-game messaging, and more.
You can see our API docs here: https://api.playfab.com/
How can we afford to go to free? Because we’re also launching our new add-on marketplace…
New Add-on Marketplace. Think of this like the Unity Asset Store, but on the backend server side. There are some really cool services out there from other companies that can help you operate your game. Services like community tools, advanced analytics, or customer service ticketing. We want to make adding one of these services as easy as pushing a button – ideally without even needing another SDK. We have several services live today, with a bunch more coming soon – and we’d love to hear what other tools or services you’d like to see in there!
Check out the services available in the marketplace at Marketplace
BattleTech as a good showcase. If you want to see our marketplace in action, check out the BattleTech community site: http://community.battletechgame.com/signin
Harebrained Schemes had chosen to use PlayFab as the backend platform for BattleTech, which is still in development. After their very successful kickstarter ($2.8M!!), they wanted to roll that kickstarter community directly onto a community site for the game. We referred them to Innervate (Innervate), one of our marketplace partners, that specializes in community tools for games.
Innervate was able to build them a website in just a few days, and because Innervate is already integrated with PlayFab, when BattleTech fans create an account on that community site, they’re actually creating a new player account in PlayFab… which means when the game eventually launches, every community member will already have a game account – and Harebrained Schemes will be able to reward their most avid community members with special in-game goodies.
Hopefully you’re as excited about these changes as we are. Finding a way to make PlayFab free realizes our dream of making a powerful backend platform available to every developer.
We’re not going to stop improving PlayFab until it’s truly world-class – as competitive as what top companies like Machine Zone or Supercell are using to operate their own games. We want to free developers to stay focused on their games
Happy Developing,
SDK & Developer Success Engineer