>> Hi, my name is Adam Tuliper.
Welcome to GDC, this is an exciting week.
We have lots of very exciting interviews.
That we're going to be doing this week,
across mixed reality,
across game development. You name it.
We're going to be talking to folks here.
All the interviews are going to be
doing here live at GDC
are going to be posted online afterwards.
You can stop by our booth
and join us for some of this, as well.
I think we have some exciting times coming ahead.
So I look forward to seeing you all this week.
Today I'm here with Brendan Vanous from PlayFab.
There's has been some recent exciting news
that's happened at PlayFab.
I was excited to hear this.
So, back in January there was
an acquisition that happened and
PlayFab is joining Microsoft.
Can you talk about what is PlayFab?
What makes up PlayFab? What's so exciting about that?
>> Yeah absolutely. So PlayFab is,
effectively, a complete back end for video games.
It's everything that's fundamental to
the needs of game developers, in the cloud.
So you've got authentication systems,
you've got data systems,
catalogues of goods, in
app purchasing, receipt validation.
And then, layered on top of all of those,
what you might think of as the fundamental components,
we've got what we call playstream,
which is all the event data coming in for your game.
Coming in in real time. The events
are coming from clients,
from servers, from third party integrations,
and it's sort of
if you think of the modern serverless computing model,
it's all of this event data that flows in,
and then there's consumers on
the stream that are there to
be enable a wide range of LiveOps capabilities.
So that games can be engaged with their players and,
you know, make the game experience
new and fresh all the time.
>> To the next level.
>> Yeah exactly.
>> Interesting you mention the term
LiveOps and so this is
a term that you started to hear more of now in
game development and game operations.
What exactly is LiveOps?
>> So LiveOps it's short for live game operations.
And it's everything that you
do with your game that's not like,
it's not about new features.
It's more about the things that you
do that are there to make
the experience continuously updated
and fresh and personalized.
So in part, it's things like,
you know in-game events.
Like you know hey we just had a bunch of
games do St. Patrick's Day that's right
>> Yes true.
>> So you know there are special St. Patrick's Day
and maybe there were new
costumes that are available for that.
Things that you can only get during
the brief window of time.
So it really incentivizes players to jump in and
be part of the experience
during that window of opportunity.
But it's also about
focusing on the different ways that people play games.
So user segmentation is
a common term that you hear in live game operations.
And it's all about finding
all the different ways that people engage with the games,
categorizing them and then
using all the different segments that a player
is part of in order to
personalize the experience as much as possible for them.
And the goal. I mean the big goal we talk about is
getting to the segment of one. Which has been.
>> Segment of one, whats that?
>> Yeah its being able to say that
I have identified enough things about you.
That I can treat you as an individual player.
There might not be another player in
the entire game that
plays the game the same way that you do.
I mean, that's pretty
high reaching blue sky kind of goal.
But you know that is the idea.
>> And so then you can tailor the experience for
that particular type of user, that single user.
>> So a simple example of that would be.
Like we have a store system.
So you would have a catalog goods and
then for the catalog you have a set of stores.
And each of the stores has
a different way to represent some set of items.
And so what you can do is you can change
which stores are showing to players
based on what user segments they are in.
So, the comparison is
to like the concept of a grocery store.
The grocery store has like an eyeline.
The eyeline is where they put the product that they make
their most profit on
because that's they want to sell to the most.
But in the case of players,
different players want to see different things.
Like a player who's never really purchased as much.
He probably want see just a couple of 99 cents items.
Whereas somebody who spends a lot of money in
games frankly doesn't want to sell 99 cents items.
They want to sell at ninety nine dollars thing that has
a million gold and the Sword of
Doom you know that's because.
>> We have a lot of users right.
>> Yeah.
>> Interesting. So tailoring
the experience for that user
to maximize their engagement.
Hopefully if you have the net purchases kind of pull a
little bit more of that out of them
for that particular user types.
Some might be into that that some might not interested.
Now, as part of the Microsoft acquisition,
we'll take a step back.
I'm a developer, I love development technologies
and I think one of the things that we try
to focus on in Microsoft is really supporting developers
anywhere regardless of your platform.
>> Yes.
>> We want to support developers on iOS.
We want to support developer on Android.
We want to support
developers if you're developing on the switch.
So as part of
this acquisition will you be
dropping any of your platform?
>> No, no absolutely not.
We've worked closely with
our partners at the various platforms to
make sure that we will continue to
support them in the same way that we have to date.
Because frankly, we want to
be there for all games, all platforms.
We are you know, platform agnostic.
>> It's good.
>> And we just want to be the thing that you're able to
use to drive those experiences
regardless of where you are and where your players are.
>> That's great whatever tools whatever development
technologies you want to support them wherever we are.
So we are- we are aligned in
that- in that vision which is
amazing for right developers.
>> Thats great.
>> Now also as an indie developer myself.
For me things that matter a lot
were free tiers of products.
>> Uh yeah.
>> And so, will you be keeping your free tier.
>> Exactly, Yeah yeah.
The free tier is really important to us.
I mean. When you look at
the games industry in general you've
got a range of different developers.
And fundamentally, in order to have
a healthy you know game development environment
across the global scope.
You need the support indie developers.
Indie developers are where you're going to get some of
your craziest freshest new ideas.
>> Absolutely.
>> And some of the most interesting
new developments in game play,
right and game play models.
So yeah, we really want to encourage
indie developers and so we will
always be keeping our free tier.
You know, we we're- we're doing what we can to
expand the capabilities of it as much as possible.
Obviously you know, we've got to
control costs a little bit.
But it's always going to be there
so the developers will be able to
get their games to market and not have to worry about,
you know ah my god my my game got
featured on this really popular site.
Now I've got a million users.
How to pay for this. We don't
want to have people have to worry about that.
>> That's good. Well so
speaking of tiers you have a free tier.
Can you walk through
what the other tiers that are involved?
>> Sure. Yeah. So in addition to the free tier,
we actually also have an indie tier which is
specifically for small indie companies.
They need a little bit
more and then they can get
in the free tier.The free tier,
I mean it's- it's you know it's a little
limited in terms of the resource availability,
but it's not limited in terms of number of users.
I need to be clear about that.
No tier is limited in number of users.
But yeah in the indie tier
it gets them some higher limits.
It still doesn't provide
the same private support
for example the professional tier does.
But it get a little bit more resource capability.
The professional tier then
is for companies that are established,
they've already had submitted titles and that's
where we introduce a MAU base.
So per MAU, monthly active user base,
is the way we do pricing on that.
We keep those prices as low as we possibly can.
We're always looking for ways to optimize.
But in the pro tier that's where we
then have private support.
We have a service level agreement things like that.
And of course our largest customers,
we have an enterprise tier 'which is really,
that's more about sort of custom relationship
between us and our biggest customer.
>> So is it really based on all MAUs.
I've heard that term a lot
lately has it all based on MAUs,
the monthly active users.
>> The core services are all MAU based.
Yes, when you talk about the professional tier.
And but in addition to the core service,
we have a few things that are usage based cost.
Which is really it's dedicated server hosting,
its CDN usage and of course we have
a whole addon marketplace of
third party technologies that we integrated into PlayFab.
So that we make those available to developers.
>> That's really true.
>> A lot of those are free. I mean all of the platform
iOS and Android and all of those platforms are free.
But there's a few where there's
some charge from the third party
like Catalpa for example.
>> Now at Microsoft we've been pretty
focused over the years on Windows and XBox.
Now we try to enable developers anywhere.
What assurances do developers
have that are currently on PlayFab,
that the support for them is going to stick around,
that PlayFab is going to stay around?
>> I mean, I hear that a lot.
I mean I'll be honest. I hear that from a lot of people.
But fundamentally, if you look at
the gaming market and you look
at the addressable space in the market.
You can see that it's you know, there's console,
there's steam, there's HTML five web games
there's mobile games.
It's all part of the total economy space of games.
Microsoft is clearly committed to being across all of it.
I mean if you look at the blog posts by Creme,
Crème Chowdry our Executive Vice President,
by Phil Spencer, our ADP excuse
me and even if I have to search an [inaudible].
Look at the quarterly business reports right.
They're all calling up the same thing.
That games is now a fundamental pillar of Microsoft.
>> Absolutely.
>> So it previously was part of the windows organization.
But now it still reports directly to [inaudible].
So there's a level of investment there that
makes it clear that Microsoft is all in on us.
>> So, again as
a developer and loving Game Dev technologies,
being part of Microsoft, I can't tell you I'm super
excited to see the engagement
that we've had in gaming platforms.
Kind of this new game killer that's
been focused and the resources
assigned to it is super exciting.
Now, from a game standpoint,
any exciting games that you guys have seen
lately that use some really neat
services is really neat integration.
I've heard Fluffy Fairy for example,
we're going to be interviewing later on
this week as well and maybe
talk about some of the services they've used on playFab.
>> Yeah, that's the one I would have pointed to because
so the Fluffy Fairy guys are going to be doing
a talk here at GDC this afternoon specifically about
their LiveOps strategy that they used for
their game and how they've developed it.
And that game was put together in eight weeks.
>> Eight weeks!
>> Yeah eight weeks.
>> That's amazing.
>> Yeah, I know it's like a game jam right.
They did a little rapid approach
to getting the game out to the market,
put it on iOS and Android and
then just really organically grew
their user base and took a lot of feedback from
the users and developed the game,
tweaked into with it and
then introduced their LiveOps program.
And so as part of this, what they're using us for,
what they're using PlayFab for specifically
is the obviously authentication and data systems
for players being able to have the data that you save
and you can save the game on one device
and move to another device and continue the game.
But also the in-app purchasing,
the analytics of the data
coming in for the player using user segmentation.
All kinds of things, right?
And it all comes together where they're
using the fundamental components of the service and
then also the LiveOps layer in order
to constantly reengage their players
and make the game more and more popular.
And Bill, you'll see a lot of
details about that today in their talk.
>> That is it, absolutely amazing.
Well, that's a lot of services and I
think how easy that it makes it for development right?
Again, having developed things over the years,
as developers we like to create things but
sometimes if it already
exists it makes sense to use it right?
Things that have been tested and develop and so,
the fact that we can take these services
integrate it and make it easy is amazing.
How do we developers get started?
>> How they get started.
>> Yup.
>> It's easy. They can just come to
developer.playFab.com, create an account.
Automatically that means they've got a studio,
they can create titles, they can start development.
I'll be honest, when you first create
a title you're in our free tee automatically.
We've actually had people who create
their games and then
get them out to market and they start having customers,
their games are live and we didn't even
know they were there because they'd never spoke to us,
they never posted anything
to our forums asking for any help.
They just got their game out there and running.
>> Wow.
>> So, yeah that's a fantastic.
>> So, Overnight Booth there's
this actually two things you guys have over here right?
The PlayFab definitive guide to LiveOps.
So, if you happen to be at GDC,
come and by, check this out.
Brendan I'm going to ask you in closing here and it might
be trying to choose the favorite amongst your children.
Do you have any favorite,
a favorite service or favorite services?
>> I'm going to have to go with play stream because
the play stream is the thing that powers the most.
To me, what's the most exciting technology that we have?
The thing that drives all the LiveOps,
is all these events and being able
to hook into it and do everything with it.
You can set up rules where if an event
comes in and it's got certain
parameters you fire things [inaudible].
>> When kind of event when you say event?
>> I'm sorry.
>> When you say event, what kind of event?
>> Oh it's anything that happens in the game.
So, when you look at all of our core technology,
log ins and purchases and things like that,
all of those things automatically
generate events into the place stream.
And it's got all the data about it.
So, log in event for example,
has the IP address,
it has Geolocation of the user,
and you can use all that to then, again like I said,
drive user segmentation or
any kind of rule system that you want to set up to it.
It's really that's the thing. It's wide
open to however you want to use it.
So, in some ways it's like we have a lot of
best practices in the LiveOps book and a lot of things
we advise people to do and we like to see people use it
because they're proven techniques that
help to make your games more successful.
But also, I don't want to limit
people because it's Greenfield,
you can do whatever you want with this time.
I want to see the kinds of
interesting things that people are
going to use this technology
to do that I didn't even think of because that's
part of what really excites me about
being in this industry in general.
>> I didn't think of that scenario. That's amazing.
Now, is this available
online as well or do you have stop by here to get it?
>> That will be available after GDC.
We didn't want to steal our own thunder.
So, we're giving out here at GDC so
folks here will be the first ones to get a hold of it,
have a grip to it.
Starting next week are going to be sending it out.
We've invited people through our newsletter,
to write to us and let us know
if you guys want to get a copy of it,
you could write us at devrel@playFab.com
and just let us know you want a copy of it.
We'll send out e-copies next week and we'll be making it
available on our site not long after that as well.
>> Awesome. Well, Brendan
this has been super exciting and thank you very
much for joining us and I'll be
excited to see what you guys have going forward.
Thank you very much.
>> Fantastic. Thank you.