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PlayFab was founded in 2014 and acquired by Microsoft in 2018. It aims to provide a comprehensive set of features for your games.

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What PlayFab does well

  • Mature
  • Anyone can sign up
  • Free tier available
  • Tightly integrated with console platforms
  • Tightly integrated with Azure

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How PlayFab and Open Game Backend differ

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Closed source

PlayFab PlayFab is closed source, which means you can’t see how it works if something breaks. If PlayFab ever goes down, you’re at the mercy of Microsoft to fix it. If PlayFab is ever shut down (like Game Sparks), you’re out of luck. Open Game Backend Open Game Backend is open-source under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. This means you can see how it works, and if something breaks, you can fix it yourself. You can host it yourself or pay someone else to host it for you.

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Rigidity & second-class scripting

PlayFab PlayFab does not allow you to modify the functionality of existing features. This means that if you want to change how something works, you will have to build it from scratch. PlayFab provides CloudScript for scripting & Entities for custom data storage. However, these have limited flexibility and are not easy to write. In order to have more flexibility, Microsoft recommends building a second backend using other Azure services, which is not ideal. Open Game Backend Open Game Backend is built from the ground up with scripting as a first-class citizen. If you want to change how something works, run opengb fork <module> and customize as needed.

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Scripting persistence

PlayFab PlayFab provides persistence through Entities. Entities are are simple key-value storage mechanism with limited access control and no support for transactions, complex queries, or indexing Open Game Backend Open Game Backend modules are provided the full flexibility of PostgreSQL, including transactions, complex queries, and indexing.

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Forces you to use Azure & its ecosystem

PlayFab If you’re not already an Azure customer, you may not want to be forced in to the Azure ecosystem. Open Game Backend Open Game Backend is built to be cloud-agnostic on common technologies. You can host it on any cloud provider, or on your own hardware.

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Unpredictable usage-based pricing

PlayFab PlayFab’s pricing is based on usage, which can be unpredictable. Open Game Backend Open Game Backend has a predictable pricing model based on the number of players.

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Fragmentation

PlayFab After being acquired by Microsoft, efforts to integrate PlayFab with Azure have fallen short and resulted in fragemented features, documentation, and SDKs upport. Read more. Open Game Backend Open Game Backend is intented to provide a strong, core engine that other modules can built on top of, which is much more sustainable than maintaining numerous APIs under poor management. Modules can come and go, but the OpenGB engine will always be well maintained.

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Documentation

PlayFab Partially because of the fragmentation, PlayFab’s documentation is incredibly hard to navigate. It’s difficult to find what you’re looking for, and when you do, it’s often outdated. Open Game Backend The OpenGB Engine provides a way to automatically generate documentation for modules, scripts, and errorrs. This means that documentation is built in to the module configs and is always up to date & autogenerated.
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