As if developing a game wasn’t hard enough, the pressure to have online components is increasing which means a whole other set of skills to learn and extra valuable time spent to ensure everything is ticking along as it should. If you’re backed by a publisher with profits closing-in on $1 billion like EA, then you can probably swing getting someone else to set-up the infrastructure for you. If this isn’t the case, then your best bet is to look at a third-party.
Even for large studios, creating multiplayer servers, leaderboards, character stats, inventories, in-app purchases and all that other stuff can be a tall order especially in regards to maintenance. It’s no wonder then that PlayFab‘s gaming BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service) has raised $2.5m to help game developers create titles which makeup part of an industry which now sells more than Hollywood blockbusters.
PlayFab was created by Former PopCap VP, James Gwertzman, who from first-hand experience could see the trouble game developers have to go through to manage their backend services. He saw an opportunity to launch a unique BaaS which covers any genre from card games to first-person shooters and assist developers so they can focus on making great releases.
The company has been three years in development, and originally launched under the name of Uber Entertainment before its re-launch alongside the enviable seed funding from Larry Bowman of Bowman Capital Management, Startup Capital Ventures, and angels and game industry vets including Scott Banister, Jason Kapalka, Chris Carvalho, Patrick Wyatt, and John Spinale.
If you take a peek into PlayFab’s Game Manager then you’ll find an immense amount of tools and services to manage things like purchases, push notifications, build deployments, and much more. At no point however is it overwhelming, although a new UI is shipping “in the next few weeks” to clean things up even more. Also in here you can find all the analytics you need to *ahem* stay on top of your game.
PlayFab supports all the popular game engines like Unity, Unreal, and Cocos2D. A partnership with Exit Games means their Photon Server is available to all PlayFab customers at no extra cost so it’s even easier to get started…
Do you think PlayFab’s BaaS will help game developers manage their online infrastructure? Let us know in the comments.
