Let me try to explain what I mean by this and why I would like to use a solution that I can set up on my own server.
During the last year, our games had about 100 million gameplays (I think it’s more because different platforms represent these statistics differently, but let’s use this number). This includes mobile and web (across a couple of portals). The average session lasts at least 10 minutes (again, hard to say for sure because of different approaches to measurement, but let’s use this number).
Let’s assume that each session finishes at least 3 levels.
So, one session requires:
- an authorization request
- and about 6 leaderboard requests
- ideally, it would be nice to have 3 save progress requests and 1 load progress request at the beginning
Maybe more, but let’s keep it like this.
100 million * (1+6+4) ~ 1.1 billion requests a year.
It sounds like a lot, but in reality, it’s about 40 requests a second, which is almost nothing, traffic-wise (just a few TB).
Now we can pick one of the services and calculate the estimated price:
1.1 billion / 1 million * 10 = $11,000 a year.
It doesn’t sound like that much for a big free-to-play (FTP) game. But as I mentioned, LTV isn’t that big as in FTP games, and this is a pretty noticeable percentage of our income. Also, I calculated very basic functionality. I would like to have much more. I can easily see how implementing new features could increase requests by a factor of five.