PlayFab Tutorial - Multiplayer Back-End for Unity

ACCESS the FULL COURSE here: https://academy.zenva.com/product/multiplayer-game-development-mini-degree/?zva_src=youtube-multiplayermd TRANSCRIPT Hey everyone, in this lesson, we are gonna be going over basically what is Playfab and how can we use it in our games. At it's core, Playfab is a backend for your game. And this is for stuff such as storing play information like player accounts. Maybe play information as well. And all sorts of stuff that you want players interacting with each other, for example, maybe trading, selling items, all the sort of stuff that you won't have directly on the client side. Something that you want in the back end so when the player turns off the game and turns it back on, that information will still be there. Traditionally you would have to do it pretty much all on your own. You would have to create your own databases and maybe set up servers and create all the backend code that can interact with your game that the client has. But in this case, Playfab has that all set up for us and really takes away the stress of wondering how to do it and if you're doing it in the right way. Taking into consideration stuff such as authentication and making sure that there can't really be any abuse from the client side of things. So, let's actually look at a bunch of different features here inside of Playfab. Right now, I'm on the Playfab website which is just Playfab.com and I'm gonna go up to features here and game services. And here we can have a look at all the different features that Playfab has. There's player authentication and linked accounts. You can create player accounts with a user name, password, email. You can also do it automatically so that the player doesn't really have to enter any information, it just automatically knows what device they're on and creates an account for that. You can also log in with Facebook, Google, all those other sort of things that you see with games as well. There's also leaderboards, you can set up leaderboards, ranking players based on pretty much anything. You can send push notifications and emails to your players. Maybe if you're informing them about a new service or a new update on the game. Of course, you can store and manage player data. Any sort of data, really, that you'd want you might wanna store how much gold or something a player has or certain features that you need for a game. Maybe other players also want to be able to access information from other players. Multiplayer services as well. Now, these multiplayer services, this isn't really working with Unity at the moment so we're not really gonna be focusing on this. There's commerce which is a big part of Playfab. This involves having items, players can have inventories that can hold items, you can trade items between players. In-game characters, allow you to create separate characters for your player maybe in your game. Players can play as different classes or different sort of things and this is how you do it. This is very similar to the way you can store individual information for each character, individual inventories, all that sort of stuff. And finally, you can create and track virtual currencies. This can be used to purchase items from the store. You can also trade currency between players, you can hand it between each other. You can also make it so that players can even buy this currency through in-game purchases. So really, this is just a list of all those sorts of services that you can have in your game and Playfab makes it so we don't have to do this all by ourselves, we don't have to set up the player authentication and logging in, we don't have to set up all the item stores, all the inventory systems, all that sort of stuff. It is already created for us here on Playfab and all we need to do in Unity is just connect to the API and create calls between it. Playfab also has both a free and paid plans. Very similar to Unity with the free plan you have access to quite a lot of the stuff. If we just scroll down here and click on compare all pricing tiers, we can see that all the stuff we really need such as in-game commerce, player profiles, content management, that all comes with the free version of Playfab. Now, it's only really necessary to get the paid plans if you do wish to have access to these professional features. Or if you get over 1000 monthly active users. So, these are unique users each month. If you get over 1000 of those, then you are required to get one of the paid versions of Playfab.