PlayFab and Synapse Real-Time Analytics (RTA) in Microsoft Fabric for Game Creators

In the dynamic and ever-growing game industry, being at the forefront of innovation isn't just a goal; it's a necessity. As we navigate shifting player expectations and evolving gaming business models, data and analytics have become indispensable tools for ensuring the success of game creators. At Microsoft we know well the power data has in delighting global customers, and within Xbox we are always seeking to empower creators across the game creation lifecycle with the tools they need to delight players everywhere.

Today, to further harness the power of data within gaming, PlayFab and Real-Time Analytics (RTA) Database are unveiling a new integration, designed to equip creators with powerful near real-time analytics.

We know that creators have table stakes needs for their game data to unlock greater success within games. Needs like scalability, advanced analytics and deep insights, all in near to real time. These essential data features ensure that creators can handle the ever-growing amount of data from a variety of sources in a way that empowers teams beyond developers, and across the game studio to understand their player and game behavior. And these data essentials ensure that deeper insights can be surfaced in near real time acting as the foundation for improving game play and player experiences to increase engagement and retention. This data infrastructure and tooling ensures creators meet evolving player expectations, by powering actions that make games more interactive, responding dynamically in concert with their player communities.

PlayFab, a set of creator services within Microsoft Gaming, brings the power of its comprehensive set of data services, which have long been helping developers ingest, distribute, analyze and act on game data with robust battle tested telemetry ingestion services, data connections service, game intelligence offerings, and our powerful PlayStream event processing engine and player actions tooling.

The Real-Time Analytics (RTA) Database is a fully managed big data analytics platform optimized for streaming and time-series data. The platform offers exceptional performance for searching structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data and can store and process data streams from various sources. RTA database is fully integrated with Microsoft Fabric products for data loading, advanced visualization, and seamlessly integrated with Power BI for report building.

Together, with this integration, PlayFab and Real-time Analytics Database are furthering our partnership to address creator challenges within gaming data:

• Enabling petabytes of multiple game events to be aggregated to a scalable database.
• Enabling near-real-time analytics with data integrated from multiple sources.
• Unlocking advanced ML analytics such as anomaly detection and player behavior clustering at scale.
• Empowering creators to monitor and optimize game behavior, track player churn and retention rates, perform player cost analysis and detect game abuse activities.
• And lastly, putting data analysis and visualization tools into the hands of creators, unlocking the ability to build Power BI dashboards of their own, taking in-game data and combining it with their organization’s data to deliver larger data value and deeper insights.

Starting today, creators can begin using PlayFab and RTA Database together by utilizing PlayFab's Data Connections service to distribute game events to RTA Databases, allowing you to generate near-real-time analytics and insights in a Power BI. We at PlayFab have also provided a sample Power BI dashboard in an open-source GitHub repository to ensure you can begin to see the power of this integration with a few simple steps that can be done in under 10 minutes. This PlayFab template enables creators to explore actionable insights with key game KPIs accessed through the Power BI dashboard.

We look forward to continuing to expand on this partnership of PlayFab and Real-time Analytics to empower game creators everywhere in getting the most out of their game data and delighting players everywhere.

To get started check out our documentation on PlayFab Data Connections, along with documentation on our integration with Microsoft Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric is now generally available (GA) to help you prepare your data for AI. Read more in the Fabric GA announcement blog.