Office Hours Recap - Team PlayFab Q&A

Game dev can be hard. There’s a lot to learn, social networks to build, and always new problems to solve. Microsoft wants as many game developers to succeed as possible, and we want to help you on your journey. That’s why, every Friday morning at 11:00 AM Pacific, we invite the game development community to join us on our official Discord for Office Hours.

By creating an open and welcoming community space, one where you can make connections with real industry professionals and ask questions about the issues that are most important to you, we’re making more resources accessible to developers of all sizes from across the globe.

Each week, we invite an experienced game developer to join us, tell their story, and answer any questions you might have about their work. If you’d like to keep up with who will be joining us and what topic we’ll be covering, join our Discord server and keep an eye on the #announcements channel for calendar updates!

On January 16, 2026, we welcomed several members of the PlayFab team to join us and answer your questions about their work. We had a huge panel this week, including:

• David Sayed, Principal Product Manager Lead

• Keith Kline, Principal Program Manager

• Kirsten Dearnley, Principal Product Manager 

• Ronald Harding, Senior Software Engineer

PlayFab is part of the greater Microsoft Gaming organization under Xbox. The team has dozens of years of experience across the industry both inside and outside of Microsoft and our specialists brought their broad experiences from both the PM and Engineering sides of development. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Azure PlayFab and want to learn more about the services it can provide for your game, head to the PlayFab documentation hub to learn more.

Q: Does PlayFab require constant online connection? 
A: [Kirsten] You need an internet connection to write or read to PlayFab, but your game logic determines when these calls are made. You can definitely create offline experiences and only sync player data to the cloud when it’s convenient for the player.  Except for multiplayer features, PlayFab does not require an always-online internet connection. 

Q: How might a single-player title make use of PlayFab services?  
A: [Kirsten] Most often, single player titles will use PlayFab for its data stream and its telemetry features. 

You might want to gather data to improve your overall game experience or balance. You might set up PlayFab to shoot telemetry over with the state of a player’s game when they start a new map or after each enemy encounter. 

Data analysis is very useful to help you really understand the current health of your game. This might be especially helpful to measure the effects of a recent patch or balance update, so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of any tweaks you might have made. 

Single player titles might also want to use PlayFab for server-authoritative data like save progression and economy can allow you to set up features like cross-platform player progression and limited time awards with a more secure mechanism.

Q: What’s the one feature PlayFab offers that you think might be underutilized by developers? 
A: [Kirsten] The features we have are really flexible and I’ve seen things used in all kinds of creative ways. You give a developer a little place to write some data on the cloud and they’ll just build whatever feature they want on top of it! We’ve seen player data used to build weekly challenges. Or Azure functions and cloud script used to write service side logic that connects to a play stream event to react in real time to player events, like welcome back messages.

It’s really only limited to what you can imagine and what your vision is for your game. I’m always delighted when someone finds new ways to use something that we weren’t expecting. 

[David] There’s a couple things I want to call out. 

One is that we’re trying to do a much better job of keeping people up to date as to what’s new. There’s so much stuff happening all the time. Sometimes there are big changes like game saves and other times it’s smaller, more quality-of-life things. We just had a November digest where we covered all the newest features. We’re getting better at publishing these. Keep an eye on the Game Dev blog for more of these in the future.

There are also plenty of people, including within our own first party studios, who only use one or two pieces of PlayFab. They might use their own matchmaking services because that’s what they’ve built over the years. So, the important piece here is that you don’t need to use all these services together. They can be utilized piece meal, which I think is quite powerful.

[Keith] A lot of times when we evaluate what we want to build or what we should build next, we look at the value of adding a feature and how many partners it might impact. We might try to avoid that really niche feature that one developer wants and we’d have to continually maintain over things that are applicable to many developers in the same space. That said, it all comes with a voice from the community giving us feedback on something that’s missing.

If someone asks for something that seems small, we take a close look at that and evaluate it while weighing it against our other priorities. Everyone in game development does this, and the more feedback we get asking for something similar, the higher up our priority list it’ll move. Our goal is to add features that will help the most people and shows value in both releasing it and maintaining it after release. It’s costly to maintain functionality and keep things up to date, so we want to avoid investing too much of our time and resources in features that would go underutilized.

All that said, if you have feedback, send it to us so we can help build the features you really need that others would use too.

Q: Are there any features that have come out recently you’d really like to highlight to our community? 
A: [Kirsten] Can I talk about the new API limits page?

[David] That’s funny; normally if we added something like a year ago, the odds that a game is using it right now would be really slim, but the exception is what you’re about to talk about!

[Kirsten] Normally when you think about developer timelines, it takes like… you know two years on the low end to 7, 8, 9 years on the high ends to build a substantially sized game. So when we release new features, we’re usually waiting to see if anyone’s picked it up for at least a year. 

But the one exception is a new page we’ve added in our settings. If you open up your PlayFab title and go to Title Settings, under “Limits” there’s a new little tab for the API limits page. Now you can see how many times you can call an API before your client gets a 429: Limit Error code. 

We’ve always had and enforced limits, but we’ve never done a great job communicating what those limits are. So now, every single title that exists can see their specific title limits. That can help feature designers and developers better understand what boundaries they’re working within and how best to build their features.

It’s not the flashiest feature, but I’m a nerd and I think that visibility is great!

[Keith] The game saves feature is a big one from last year because it helped button up our entire cross progression and cross play story. That’s a huge success because the more seamless your game can go across all platforms without any visible edges for your players to see, the better. 

Q: What’s the biggest benefit to using PlayFab in my title?  
A: [Kirsten] Developers only have so much time in a day or on a project. PlayFab might not sound like it’s a bunch of flashy features, but it is all the boring, necessary bits that your game still needs to function. Nobody wants to go and write their own networking layer these days. Why would you spend your precious development time on that when you could just use something like PlayFab, right?

Then you can spend your time on the hard problems, the interesting things that haven’t been solved, and the parts that are specific to your game: polishing, fixing that bug, finding the fun, and so forth. The more time you have to polish, the better your game is going to be, so using PlayFab is just going to buy you more time for that extra polish.

[David] There are some very large games that PlayFab is powering, so there is good proof it works at scale. 

One of the other benefits you can find in our documents is the title launch checklist. When you’re going in to launch your game, there’s always going to be some little thing you miss. A common gotcha that we see is people will forget to include a “click to launch” button on their title. 

Q: Can you share some use case examples of PlayFab in action? 
A: [Kirsten] Back to an earlier topic about always-online connections, I worked on a game team that intentionally built a telemetry system that was resistant to internet connectivity drops. On Doom Eternal, we wrote a lot of game client logic to capture telemetry data we thought would be useful. Then, if the game went offline, we’d store it in a “rolling buffer” for a limited period. Then we attempted to upload that telemetry the next time the game client went online.

Our new Game Saves feature has its own in-built offline support. In the past, you might have needed to warn a player to avoid disconnecting before their game save upload has been completed. Now, even in cases where the upload may have failed from an unexpected disconnection, it’ll still restore from that local save and then give your user a choice to pick which save they want to maintain.

Some of you might already be using these services! There’s quickly becoming less of a gap between what you would have seen as PlayFab versus Xbox network services or Xbox Live before. It’s all one team now coming up with great solutions. 

Q: Can I use PlayFab for localization? 
A: [Kirsten] Localization includes a lot of different parts, including translation. PlayFab doesn’t have any direct translation services right now, at least not broadly speaking. While there is support for real-time player communications that offers real-time translation, that data is ephemeral and not intended to translate any of your in-game strings or assets.

However, once you have your translated string table, you can use PlayFab’s title data to distribute that translated string table to your title and even have your game client save to disk. You could add versioning tags onto it to let the client know when they need to update and pull the data again to optimize it for costs if you wanted to keep the number of reads low. 

So, there’s a part of localization it can help with, but you will have to find a different service to complete the translation component of a localization pipeline.

Q: What’s the best way to get feedback to the PlayFab team? 
A: [David] There are a variety of channels you can use. You can always reach out to us here on Discord. Depending on what studio you’re with, you might work with developer relations directly or have a development partner manager you can talk to. If you’re part of the ID@Xbox program, you have a direct channel for that sort of thing too. 

One other pathway is on our Microsoft.Learn documentation. There’s a feedback button on every single PlayFab documentation page. If something is out of date, wrong, confusing, or missing, just shoot feedback through that button. We triage that regularly and that’s also guaranteed to get a documentation update.

We’re looking at more ways to watch additional channels, but posting feedback here in Discord is a great place to start and will help give us visibility into what the trending questions are.

Q: I’m currently using cloud script legacy revisions. Are there any plans to sunset these? 
A: [Kirsten] There are no plans to just turn it off and break people’s games. There are a lot of games that were built on top of it and they’re still operating well, so we don’t want to interfere with that. 

We have marked it legacy because we’re not adding any new features or functionality to it. We’re not aware of any bugs with it. But if you find one, the amount of support we can give you on that feature is deprioritized. We do encourage you to switch over to Azure Functions if you have the time and capacity. That development environment is just better and well supported, so it’s going to continue to get bigger and better and gain more features. We’re not going to force you to change over, but there is a lot of benefit in doing so.

There might also be a time when we stop onboarding new titles that use legacy cloud script, too. I’m not aware of any dates for that now, but it’s good to keep in mind. When we deprecate features, we do our best to do so in a way that won’t break existing games.

Q: Any last pieces of advice for our game development community? 
A: [David] One PSA I’d like to share is that, no matter what size studio you are, if you’re using PlayFab and you have multiple points of contact for your service needs, make sure you go into game manager and check that the email address and contact information is correct! 

If you’re a smaller studio, this may be the only way we have to contact you, so if there’s a billing issue and we can’t reach you, at some point, we’ll have to turn your services off. We don’t want to have to do that, so please keep your info up to date!