What is PlayFab?

PlayFab is a complete backend platform for games, featuring managed game services, real-time analytics, and live operations management capabilities. These features help you engage and retain players, monetize your experiences, collect and analyze game data, and build player experiences across gaming platforms and devices. PlayFab’s cost-effective and highly-scalable solutions are backed by the world-class infrastructure and a global reach of Azure, allowing all game creators to build and launch their games with confidence. Whether you’re a team of one or one thousand, PlayFab has solutions that scale for all sizes of game. PlayFab is the perfect complement to your game: choose which PlayFab features you want to use, extend PlayFab capabilities with cloud-based logic, or connect PlayFab with your own bespoke game services. By managing the essential backend components, PlayFab can help you and your team devote more time to innovating and perfecting the elements of your game that matter most.

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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 identify 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.
• Extend PlayFab capabilities with add-ons, automations, CloudSript, and Azure Functions.

To use PlayFab features, you must sign up for a PlayFab developer account. PlayFab provides the following services:

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Cross-network identity

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.

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Live service management

Game Manager web portal: A shared space (with roles and access permissions) where studio members can build, configure, and operate your game. Title data: Manage your game configuration remotely. Real-time segmentation: Use data properties to bucket players into segments and trigger actions as they enter or exit. Experimentation: Run experiments to identify the best strategies for operating your game. Title communication: Talk to your community with push notifications, emails, and message-of-the-day pop-ups. Cheat prevention: Defend against unwanted behavior and remove fraudulent players and accounts. Customization: Use PlayFab-hosted data and logic to build custom game mechanics. 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.

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Economy, monetization, and user generated content

Item catalog: Configure your catalog of items available for in-app granting or purchase, and update at any time. 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 (UGC): 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.

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Multiplayer

Matchmaking - Use the proven capabilities of XBOX’s matchmaking service on any platform to help players find opponents.

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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.

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Community

Leaderboards: Facilitate permanent or time-limited competitions among friends or strangers.

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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.

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Player progression

Player data and profiles: Share player information and game state across devices. Statistics: Aggregate and store numerical values to represent a player’s progress and accomplishment for easy sharing across devices.

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Game data

Reports: Evaluate your game’s daily and monthly performance using industry-standard metrics, pre-calculated for you daily and on-demand. 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. Event filter and search: Zoom in on a time slice to analyze players, events, and error conditions in detail. Event archiving: Schedule event exports to a pre-existing Azure Blob Storage or Amazon S3 data warehouse.

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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. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA): PlayFab is in use today by COPPA compliant games.

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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.

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Support

Documentation: Get started quickly with tutorials, samples, and comprehensive reference documentation. Discord forums Find a developer community, check on service status, post questions, share answers, and discuss the PlayFab product experience on the XBOX Game Dev Discord 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.