Azure Cloud Migrations.
Designing or selecting a cloud solution for your game can be difficult. There’s so much to consider, and while transitioning your infrastructure is a delicate and nuanced process, we’re here to lend you our expertise.
We’ve got years of experience behind us when it comes to understanding the unique setup and requirements of every game and that’s what underpins our specialism in the seamless migration of game payloads to a new cloud service provider. Our refined internal processes, honed through numerous migrations, ensure you leverage our experience with minimal disruptions to your game estate.
We work closely with our partners at Microsoft Azure, so if you’re feeling overwhelmed by balancing budgets, judging scalability, and predicting user uptake – leave it to the Wizards.
“And so our story begins.”
Our Wizards are with you every step of the way of your Azure journey and no step is more important than your first. We start with your final destination in mind so we can ensure that we stay on track.
Our Cloud Migration Assessment provides you with a technical and economic landscape that will help you navigate. This means you can be confident in the strategic roadmap laid out before you, reassuring all stakeholders.
As a tech partner and service provider, we have the support of Microsoft to help guide your migration to Azure.
PlayFab
Build and operate live games on a single platform. PlayFab gives you everything you need—game services, data analytics, and live operations tools—to launch faster, extend your game’s lifecycle, and reduce costs.
What exactly is PlayFab?
PlayFab is a complete backend platform for living games with managed game services, real-time analytics, and LiveOps; features that can help you boost revenue and increase player engagement while reducing costs.
PlayFab’s backend services reduce the barriers to launch for game developers, offering both large and small studios cost-effective development solutions that scale with their games and help them engage, retain, and monetize players. PlayFab enables developers to use the intelligent cloud to build and operate games, analyze gaming data and improve the overall gaming experience.
The PlayFab platform is a natural complement to Azure for gaming. For your players, this leads to a higher, faster degree of innovation and better experiences.
TL;DR
A complete backend platform for live games. Provides access to powerful tools that help you manage game services, including real-time analytics and LiveOps.
Boost revenue by increasing player engagement and reducing costs.
Multiplayer Wizards and PlayFab
PlayFab, when coupled with Azure, is your one-stop shop for a game’s backend and servers.
So how can we help? Our wizards are experts at implementing PlayFab’s multiplayer features and services, building them into your game.
Multiplayer Services
Cross-Network Identity and Data Player Authentication
Frictionless authentication that lets players link accounts across Windows, Xbox, Steam, PlayStation™ Network, Nintendo, Facebook, iOS, Android, and more
Player Data Management: Share player information and game state across devices
Matchmaking: Use the proven capabilities of Xbox SmartMatch on any platform to help players find opponents
Multiplayer Servers
Dedicated Servers: low-latency real-time gameplay for any platform
24/7 Monitoring and DDoS Protection: Protect against DDoS attacks and other incidents Global Reach: Get closer to players on a cloud with more global regions than any other provider
Control Costs: Dynamically scale server cores in response to demand
Lobby services: Azure PlayFab Lobby creates cross-platform scalable grouping mechanisms for players to play together
Chat
Party: Connect players with low-latency peer-to-peer communication
Text and Voice Chat: accessible voice chat, transcription, and translation
Accessibility: automated speech-to-text transcription and voice synthesis
Real-Time Translation: Break down global barriers and grow player concurrency by translating voice and text chat between more than 30 different languages
Encryption: Ensure secure player communications
Leaderboards and Statistics
Tournaments and Leaderboards: Facilitate permanent or time-limited competitions
Scheduling: Reset leaderboards on a schedule and archive standings so players can view past results
Prizes: Reward players based on their actions and leaderboard ranks
Cheat Prevention: Detect and defend against unwanted behavior; remove fraudulent player accounts
LiveOps
Engagement and Retention
Game Manager Web Portal: A shared space where studio members can build, configure and operate your game
Daily Reports: Evaluate performance using the top metrics from across the industry, pre-calculated for you daily
Player Profiles: Track players across authentication services and enable cross-play across multiple platforms
Customization: Use server-hosted player data and logic to build custom game mechanics
Achievement Systems: Use the rule engine and custom player events to build a powerful achievements system
Real-Time Segmentation: Act immediately on targeted groups of players
Player Communication: Engage your community with push notifications, emails, and message-of-the-day pop-ups
Automation
CloudScript: Build lightweight logic processing when you want server authority without a dedicated server
Task Scheduling: Predefined actions to manage anything from prices and events to messaging lapsed players
A/B Testing
Player Buckets: Run experiments across your player-base
Content Managment
Remote Config: Manage your game configuration remotely
Item Catalog: Configure your catalog of items available for in-app granting or purchase, and update at any time.
Content Delivery Network: Upload, host, and deliver game assets via Game Manager
Monetization
There has been a major change from the previous PlayFab Monetization suite with the goal of supporting titles with hundreds of millions of active players, large progression systems, and giant inventories. The architecture has been rebuilt on the modern Azure Stack from the ground up, targeting developers’ needs. Introducing Economy v2:
- Updated interactions between the inventory and catalog allow you to support unique items, non-unique items, stacks of items, and multiple stacks of items
- Batch operations
- Handling of high concurrency rates, especially with inventory interactions Large unified catalog (unlimited number of items) of in-game goods or UGC
- Individual Catalog Item documents instead of all items being stored in a single document
- Large player inventories (3,000+ items)
Data and Analytics
Real-Time Analytics
PlayStream: Monitor a unified real-time stream (and historical archive) of every event fired by your game Real-Time Rules Engine: Powerful actions and triggers that respond to PlayStream events.
Real-Time Segmentation: Use data properties to bucket players into segments and trigger actions as they enter or exit.
Event Filter and Search: Zoom in on a time slice to analyze players, events, and error conditions.
Reports: Review summaries of your game’s daily and monthly performance.
PlayFab’s true excellence is its flexibility, giving you the power to build and run a game that makes an impact. Code Wizards will build or integrate your gameserver, and assist in the writing and deployment of CloudScript – one of PlayFab’s most versatile features. It allows client code to request execution of custom server-side functionalities, and can be used in conjunction with virtually anything you can imagine.
Meanwhile, Multiplayer Wizards provide a holistic view of all your game backend services, including Azure, PlayFab, and any custom services you might have. We deliver all the documentation, tutorials, and handovers you’ll need to ensure this process is smooth and keeps your pipelines moving. Our expert wizards are on hand for ongoing conversations via dedicated Slack channels, providing 24/7, around-the-clock assistance.
Thinking of implementing PlayFab?
Leave it to the Wizards.
Multiplayer, Multiplayer, Multiplayer
Whether you’re looking for someone to build you a custom gameserver or to integrate your existing gameserver, Multiplayer Wizards will help you host your multiplayer game, using PlayFab Multiplayer Game Servers.
Our experienced, expert wizards use PlayFab Multiplayer Servers to host multiplayer game sessions – from creating game servers that are ready to connect players for a game session to scaling them dynamically to meet demands. Here’s how:
1
Whether you need us to build you a new one from the ground up, or you want us to integrate your existing gameserver, we make sure what you’re working with is compatible with PlayFab. And if it isn’t, we’ll make it compatible.
2
Once you have a game server build that can run on PlayFab Multiplayer Game Servers, we configure how you want the servers/virtual machines (VMs) to be created for you. This step is known as creating or deploying builds.
You specify the type of servers you want, regions they are in, what is on the server, and how they scale. Then we do the rest!
3
After deployment, we’re able to dynamically spin up new virtual machines and recycle used ones. This ensures that your title is able to fulfill player demand and maintain standby levels that you’ve specified. We’ll even help you figure out if it’s Scaling Standy, Scheduled Standby, or Dynamic Standby that you need. We’ll deploy APIs for no-fuss, automated scaling.
If you’re looking to experiment with gameserver versioning, Multiplayer Wizards will aid with A/B testing, seamless integration, and backwards compatibility.
4
When players initiate a multiplayer experience, your User Datagram Protocol (UDP) messages to PlayFab’s Quality of Service (QoS) beacons. We monitor and report on response times, measuring network latency. We use this data to determine the datacenters in which to request optimal gameservers, and match these to your requirements.
5
When a player needs multiplayer servers, it will be allocated from the build’s standby pool. This request can come from many sources, including PlayFab Matchmaking, or your custom lobby and matchmaking services. PlayFab Matchmaking service is a cross-platform matchmaking service that is able to automatically allocate PlayFab Multiplayer Servers.
6
PlayFab will fulfill a server request within one second if standby servers are available. Once a server has been put into the active state, clients connect to the server and play!
