Superstar Session: Azure PlayFab Party Showcase

all right we are rolling into our final talk of the day uh which is with caroline from microsoft and she'll be coming in with a superstar session um about azeroth playfab party hi daniel hi everyone thanks for having me no worries welcome in um are you ready to start showing your presentation can i share my screen let's see so let me know if you can see it yeah we can see that looks great perfect okay so i started hi everyone my name is caroline i am a program manager at microsoft and thank you for coming to cultivating multiplayer and social experiences with azure playback party or just party for

short so this session will go over what party is and we'll have a deep dive into party features and then if we have time at the end we'll have a quick start and the last is q a so let me begin by saying this your name sorry your game is stronger when you your players are together your clients are internal purple and your code base is unified and what do i mean by that i mean that essentially if your game can be a platform that brings people together and cultivate online social network have people make friends online and they can communicate through your game and on the other hand it cultivates inclusivity and diversity it has accessibility features and it has different language support to allow players to communicate across the globe then your game is stronger with a stickier player base so this is where

party comes in party connects player devices with an encrypted and low latency network and through this network you can exchange game data as well as chat data such as voice and text chat as well as transcription or text to see speech synthesis and translation today party um powers more than a hundred games such as gears halo no man's sky minecraft sea of thieves stew forza and so many more so let's take a closer look at party first let's talk about our network capabilities we are a low latency cloud relay backed by azure that automatically scales according to need players are not directly talking to each other peer-to-peer they go through our cloud relay so this solves a lot of security problems for example dbdos or met in the middle of text we

definitely use this kind of relay to protect our users in addition we have industry standard encryption we use dtls 1.2 and authentication services our in-game voice and text chat leverages the technology that powers xbox live party chat and this is a very mature technology it is tested and reliable and furthermore we offer a lot of flexibility we allow you to have different designs in your communication scenarios for example you can have everyone talk to everyone in your multiplayer game or you can have smaller groups talking only within the group not with each other or you have other custom communication scenarios but it wouldn't be good if party is so secure and robust but it's super hard to implement right so fortunately we are very easy to integrate we have our plugins with unreal and unity game engines so you can easily

integrate with those engines and our platform our c plus core solution is cross-platform we support windows xbox playstation nintendo switch ios android and google stadia and it's worth mentioning that we are a one-stop solution for transporting all types of game data including game mechanics chat or whatever you want and last but not the least we are powered by azure cognitive services that means um we support speech to text text-to-speech a lot of different languages like i mentioned before so you can easily navigate compliance requirements so let's just dive a little bit deeper into content services in this demo i show on the screenshot here there are two users one is talking in russian and one is talking in hindi they can talk to each other in their own languages in real time and see the translation

so azure supports more than 70 languages so you can definitely leverage this to connect your users or your players globally so let's switch gears a little bit let's talk about pricing if your game is on the xbox live sign-on system meaning that your players signing use xbox live either on the pc or on the xbox console party is completely free for you and for everyone else we have a free dev mode you can use all party offerings for 10 000 free connectivity minutes per month and up to 100 000 unique users during development and after you try party for free and you like it you want to convert to a paid customer you only pay for what you use we have transparent meters connected minutes voice minutes and network egress that bill for only what you use meaning

that if your p concurrent user's account is really high and you don't have to pay during your load time for all those idle servers and we are affordable we've invested a large amount of resources in making party run efficiently so you pay the least egress incurred or voice minutes so let's put everything into perspective a little bit using this case study we have three titles here of different sizes as you can see from the pcu and party charges by the three middle columns that i have made 3d the connectivity the voice and the egress and now the percentage of xbox players means how many people in your player base sizing using xbox live for those people we don't charge at all so let's take title 3 as an example the p concurrent user is around 1100 and that will translate to

roughly 11 million connectivity minutes per month and around 66k minutes of voice if you do have voice enabled in the game and 55 gigs of egress so say half of your uh your player base signs in using xbox live you're probably looking at around 60 per month so this is assuming that you're using party for all of your game data including mechanics and chat so yeah i think we have some time for quick start so first if you want to use party you will need a playfab account crowdparty is part of the playfab ecosystem you will first navigate to developer.playfab.com for a sign up and you can put in some um you know tell us a little bit

about yourself and if you have not yet finalized the game name or the studio name you can change it later the next step is to create your first game so here you enter the name of the game and you can tell us what genre your game is or does it use monetization what player modes um so bear in mind this is just for playfab um so we have a single player and multiplayer uh choice here but party which is um my area it's only uh one of the offerings in playfab and then you would click create title and then now you will see this dashboard after you have created your first game when you have successfully created your

account you'll see oh my game and i click into it and then after you click into my game you can click onto this multiplayer tab here and then go to party and then you click enable here in the center of the screen and after that your party is enabled you can download our sdks you can navigate to this link and we offer a variety of different sdks with you know different platforms you can choose from and they all have samples and comprehensive documentation that you can follow so yeah you can try party for free today any questions thank you so much that was super insightful uh we've got a few questions in the uh in the q a

uh so first off we've got how can ndd developers get started with party um yeah sorry though i've just been reminded i need to welcome your colleague deb into the call as well sorry about that thank you there we go hi deb good morning good evening yeah we can hear you now all good yep and so i'll ask that one again just so you guys can both hear it um how can indie developers get started with party so um it's fairly simple you uh as i mentioned in the quick start guide you would follow the instructions on our documentation and create an account with playfab and then you can try party for free just click enable party okay and someone has said how accurate

are the translations do they take into consideration slangs and cultural cues yeah so we we are backed by azure cognitive services where just as accurate as azure cognitive services is it from from my understanding it does have a knowledge of slangs but probably you know not as good as human hearing for sure but for more details i would probably look into azure cognitive services to kind of try that out to see if the capabilities are strong enough for your needs okay um somebody has said why is party a better option than current competitors that's a great question so if i may go back to these slides here so this is how we kind of differentiate from our competitors

our network capabilities are very robust we are a completely relayed service that means that we're secure we protect all our players from network attacks and everything goes through our cloud relay this relay is backed by azure as well and it's geo distributed that means if your game player base is mostly in asia or europe or america we have data centers everywhere around the world and also our voice and text chat technology is the same technology that powers xbox live party chat and that service has been tested and it's very mature um so i think this is part of the reason why we're we're different and also we have a lot of different sdks you can choose from our collection is cross-platform and it has integration with middleware

um so really i think party would be a one one stop solution and if you come to party you probably wouldn't have to integrate another solution for uh you know network for example or for chat or you have to you know use a different networking solution for playstation for example um so yeah we are cross-platform and the best thing i think my personally uh you know favorite is that you can have your player base communicating with all these platforms between platforms so it's just not just pc players communicating within pc the pc pool or android and ios communicating only within the mobile player base you can actually have everyone play together across the world um so i'm thinking about um like the pool of players that maybe um play together but they also know each other outside of the game and will communicate on

outside platforms and like discord or teamspeak or something um what are the motivations for those types of players to um use this platform instead of um like third-party communication platforms yeah so i i think uh going back to you know xbox where uh proven technology and our player base is you know uh we we have had you know a history of gamers coming to our platform so i believe this is something that people you know it would be their first choice if they have been on xbox fan and they know our technology well they would be very um eager to you know be on our platform as well i don't know if dave you have anything to add to that yeah so i think like one of the other things is um if you are actually a truly

cross-platform game you just have to write your code once right so you actually don't need to integrate with these different types of social media platforms on you know having different kind of like you know integration technologies you write your code once and it's basically um the same infrastructure that you use both for your voice data and your like game data so it makes your integration like much much easier as well as it provides like a similar type of interface um you know for community for your users to communicate regardless of the platform that they're actually on okay uh we've got another question in the audience saying um i noticed that there isn't much support for unreal engine uh i'm like right the slide disappeared if i could read all of it so right now um we do support unreal uh for the gdk which is um you know the

development kit for the new xbox console as well as uh you can use the same development kit on windows pc we also support the xdk which is the development environment for the previous version like xbox one and then shortly we'll be lighting up support for both switch and playstation platforms and then you know depend depending on you know the user demand if we have customer demand we'll um also lighting up support for ios and android is on our roadmap okay brilliant uh we've got what genres of hyper casual games uh do you see party being used for caroline do you not take that did i hear casual games or hyper casual hyper cancel i'm not familiar with that term um basically just sort of um how do you describe it um

it's a very mobile centric term i think um so it's like candy crush yeah like an easy to play like free to play with very minimal um kind of ui uh yeah i guess kind of crochet six yeah so um so i think like uh for most of the hyper casual games i have played so far like uh there's usually not much of like a voice component but like if you're in a kind of like a multiplayer scenario um you know i don't know like um like if you're if you're playing like you know some sort of strategy game um on your mobile and you want you have game data to be transported i think that's where we would see you using party um also i believe like for those kind of genre of games you will most likely not be using the party c plus plus or the c library but most likely be using unity to build some of that so so yeah okay cool and we've got one more question how

early would you advise indie developers to test party in their games um so we typically recommend like testing as soon as possible but um our integration time should be like around if you are using c or c plus plus it should be between 1 to 1.5 weeks uh if you are using unity it should be much shorter less than a week but we'd recommend testing at least three months before you're supposed to go live so that you know like we have time to iron out any kind of issues that you might have with your account maybe not party related but maybe like you know playfab uh you have other issues with you know playfab and then having a three-month lead time really gives us the ability to help you um iron out all of those issues yeah okay brilliant um that's all the questions we've got in so i will wrap that one up there but thank you guys so much for coming in and talking about playfab some great insights there and thank you so much for sponsoring the event as well absolutely brilliant and i hope you

enjoyed the rest of the event thank you so much perfect thank you questions you