Azure PlayFab Economy v2 is now in Public Preview
Check out the same cloud economy system that powers Minecraft, Sea of Thieves, and Flight Simulator.
Today, we are excited to present our latest update to Azure PlayFab: Economy v2. Economy v2 can now support massive player bases with hundreds of millions of active players, giant catalogs, and large inventories without big performance issues. It also includes key feature updates across Inventory, Virtual Currencies, Marketplace Integration, Catalog, and others. We built Economy V2 on top of Microsoft Azure and we tested it by actually shipping our own internal games on top of the platform (games like Sea of Thieves, Minecraft, and Microsoft Flight Simulator).
Now, it's in public release with more features to be released by the end of 2022. We designed Economy v2 to inspire you to build better in-game experiences and deliver a growing collection of features to help you drive deep player engagement and monetization. We're excited to have you start building the future of games with Economy v2. You can read about all the new features below.
Currently, PlayFab Economy v1 supports thousands of active titles. These titles have relied on us since 2014 to handle their inventory progressions, in-game catalog of goods, and server-side marketplace purchase validations. Supporting a vast range of different games incurred a large number of feature requests and asks for improvements. For example, we received requests for larger catalog support, larger player inventories, idempotent transactions, batch operations, and better handling of high levels of concurrency with inventory and wallet interactions.
Economy v2 is a result of this close feedback loop with actual game developers serving millions of players around the world. Note that we will continue to support Economy v1 but will be asking new titles to start out using v2.
Key Feature Updates
Inventory
Inventories have been re-built on top of an updated transactional system that allows for stacking, batch operations and large inventories without hitting concurrency issues.
Stacks of items and multiple stacks of items. Great for tracking ammunition or crafting materials.
Inventory collections enables you to create multiple inventories. You can have separate inventory sets for different player characters like a wizard or rogue.
Large inventory capacity that supports more than 3000 custom items. The new architecture offers high levels of concurrency performance.
Bulk operations using batch APIs enables players to add/remove items in bulk and purchase multiple items at once.
Virtual Currencies
Virtual Currencies have been revamped to contain standard metadata and support higher levels of transactions.
Unlimited currencies. Create as many currencies as you want.
Currencies are now like any other Catalog Item and can possess higher level metadata like prices.
Marketplace Integration
Cross-platform item redemption is the most popular feature in Economy today. v2 continues to provide integration with many marketplaces, including Google Play, Apple, Microsoft/Xbox, PlayStation™, Nintendo, and Steam. We've done our best to make onboarding as easy as possible via our PlayFab Plugins.
Idempotent transactions help maintain the integrity of all marketplace operations. This feature can prevent lost receipts and double redemption issues.
Link items to multiple external marketplaces and simplify Buy Once Play Anywhere (BOPA) scenarios.
Catalog
This new version of Catalog is designed to help you meet the demands of managing all sizes of catalogs for a global audience with high performance. Create, view, search, review, and gather player feedback about catalog items.
Store in-game item images and files alongside your Catalog metadata.
Completely customize your in-game catalog views. Create views that dynamically update using Tags, Content Types, and Catalog Search.
Pre-publish items for reviewers, or with a future start date that corresponds to a new game season.
Item draft states can be used to build out a content flow for your studio.
Localize your Item Titles and Description strings.
Get feedback about your items from players with item ratings and reviews.
Updates to stores allow for dynamic sales using search query filters.
Thank you for your continued support! We are super excited about all the possibilities this set of features unlocks for you. There is still more to be done. Look for another update in Economy v2 later this calendar year as we roll out:
Support for virtual subscriptions and subscription marketplace integrations
Marketplace inspection APIs for debugging and configuring your redeem scenarios
Player Transaction History
Learn more about the new features of Economy v2 in our documentation or get started with Economy v2 right away with our guide. You can even download the new plugins for the game engine you are using right here.
Your feedback helps us improve our services. Please send comments, questions, and feature requests to the PlayFab Community Forums.
Talk to you soon. Until then: You make it fun. We'll make it run.