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What is PlayFab?

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PlayFab is a complete backend platform for live games with managed game services, real-time analytics, and LiveOps. These features can help you boost your revenue and increase player engagement while cutting costs. This topic provides a high-level overview of the PlayFab features.

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 overall gaming experiences. The PlayFab platform is a natural complement to Azure for gaming (Visit azure.com/gaming for more info). Azure, with locations in 42 regions worldwide, provides world-class server infrastructure, allowing creators to focus on building great games with best-available global reach. For gamers, this leads to a higher, faster degree of innovation and better experiences.

PlayFab Features

Using PlayFab you can:

  • Remove the challenges of building, managing, and running low latency multiplayer servers at scale with a complete back-end solution.
  • Use multiple forms of built-in authentication to track players across devices.
  • Provide players the ability to communicate via in-game chat with full transcription and translation services.
  • Deepen player engagement with sophisticated LiveOps tools by creating rich player segments and running A/B experiments.
  • Quickly create leaderboards and run content experimentation to deepen player engagement.
  • Accelerate growth with economy services that let you create and track virtual currencies, manage stores of items, and process payments.

To use PlayFab features, you must sign up for a PlayFab developer account.

PlayFab provides the following services:

Multiplayer Services

Cross-Network Identity and Data

Player Authentication: Start with frictionless authentication and let players link accounts to roam 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 Live's SmartMatch on any platform to help players find opponents.

"PlayStation" is a registered trademark or trademark of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.

Multiplayer Servers

Dedicated Servers: Deliver low-latency real-time gameplay for any platform.

24/7 Monitoring and DDoS Protection - Protect against DDoS attacks and other incidents.

Global Reach with Microsoft Azure: 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.

Chat

Party: Connect players with low-latency peer-to-peer communication.

Text and Voice Chat: Facilitate accessible voice chat, transcription, and translation.

Accessibility: Use automated speech-to-text transcription and voice synthesis to make communication simple for everyone.

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 amongst friends or strangers.

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: Defend against unwanted behavior and remove fraudulent players and accounts.

LiveOps

Engagement and Retention

Game Manager Web Portal: A shared space (with roles and access permissions) where studio members can build, configure and operate your game.

Daily Reports: Evaluate your game's performance through the lens of the top metrics used across the industry, pre-calculated for you daily.

Player Profiles: Track players across authentication services and 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: Talk to your community with push notifications, emails, and message-of-the-day pop-ups.

Content Management

Title Data: - 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.

A/B Testing

Player Buckets: Run experiments with randomly assigned groups of players.

Monetization

Stores and Sales: Target player segments with personalized store offers and support payments with Xbox, Steam, Google, PayPal, and more.

Virtual Economy: Mint promotional coupons and virtual currencies with support for setting initial balances and optional auto-recharge.

User Generated Content: Empower players to create, upload, and search for moderated content.

Drop Tables: Craft attractive bundles for first-time or regular users and stimulate demand with item scarcity.

Fraud Prevention: Use server-side receipt validation to make sure purchases are genuine before completion.

Automation

CloudScript: Build lightweight logic processing when you want server authority without a dedicated server.

Task Scheduling: Set up pre-defined actions to manage anything from prices and events to messaging lapsed players.

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: Set up 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 in detail.

Reports: Review summaries of your game's daily and monthly performance with automatic reports available by daily email and on-demand.

Data Management

Insights: Gather all event and processed data into a single title database in the cloud.

Event Archiving: Schedule event exports to a pre-existing Azure Blob Storage or Amazon S3 data warehouse.

Compliance

GDPR: PlayFab is committed to being General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant and as your service provider, ensuring that we provide you with the hooks you need to allow players to view or delete their data.

COPPA: PlayFab is in use today by COPPA compliant games.

SDKs

SDKs are available for most popular languages, platforms, and game engines. See the SDKs overview to find the PlayFab SDK you need by feature area, then choose from among the languages, platforms, and game engines supported by each.

Support

Documentation: Get started quickly with tutorials, samples, and comprehensive reference documentation.

Forums: Learn from experts and share your knowledge in the community forums.

Slack: Join channels for ongoing conversations with other developers and direct communication with PlayFab Developer Success.

Real-Time Service Health: Visit status.playfab.com for current and historical service health information.

Tickets: Get enterprise-level ticketed support.

24/7 Emergency Escalations: Get around-the-clock assistance on immediate-priority issues.