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PlayFab Items (Legacy Economy)

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Important

Economy v1 APIs are in maintenance mode and will not be receiving any new features, only bug fixes. The v1 APIs will be maintained for the foreseeable future. See the Economy v2 Overview to learn more about the next version of PlayFab Economy!

Items and inventories are common mechanisms that you can use to add customization and depth to your game. Defining and tracking items in PlayFab gives you top-notch analytics and LiveOps support for your in-game catalog.

Key concepts

  • Catalog - Catalogs offer an easy way to manage your game's virtual items. They're listings of every item available in your game.
  • Catalog Items – PlayFab Items can represent just about any type of virtual goods that you might use, from Durables to Bundles to Locked containers.
  • Player Inventory - All player accounts have an inventory. The inventory contains all of the owned Item Instances and item history to-date.
  • Virtual Currency - Currencies can be used to purchase Items from the Catalog or a Store, represent soft currency converted from In App Purchases, or be used as a mechanic to drive game play.

PlayFab provides a large interactive playing field for interaction with items and inventory, and the Item definition in the Catalog allows for quite a bit of customization. However, most common interactions are through just a few key APIs:

  • PurchaseItem - Buys a single catalog item with virtual currency, subtracting the currency and adding an Item Instance into the Player/Character Inventory.
  • GetCharacterInventory and GetUserInventory – These APIs retrieve the specified Character or the player’s current Inventory of virtual goods.