GBaaS Dev Community
Overview
When creating Throne of Lies, we went through a great variety of Game Backends as a Service (GBaaS) for a variety of reasons:
[2016] UNET -> [2016] PlayFab -> [2017] GameSparks -> [2020] BrainCloud
There was no particular group to ask questions to, other than potentially-biased developers of their own systems. There was previously no way to tell what was lacking, what was missing, and overall if a particular service accomplished what it was expected to accomplish.
Thus, I created the following:
(1) The GBaaS Dev Community Discord
I created this Discord hub to centrally discuss GBaaS with other devs - and there is no other community anything like it, for this niche topic.
- Founder and lead organizer, containing 1.5k+ members with 20+ official ambassadors from their respective service.
- B2B networking, gathering numerous official ambassadors, including: Epic Games, Amazon, Microsoft, AccelByte, Photon, AcceleratXR, Edgegap, [...]
- We are the only external community with Epic Games representatives on an official basis (to my knowledge).
(2) The GBaaS Mega Comparison Sheet
The mega comparison sheet was created to verbose compare the major services in explicit detail. There are so many moving parts to these services that one may need to closely look at specific feature sets and how they may potentially interact with each other.
Role:
As the community manager and sheet creator, I initially sourced and curated all ambassadors/content/comparisons. As the community grew, both ambassadors and devs aided me in expanding the mega comparison sheet and engaged in the Discord community.
Stack:
- Discord
- Google Sheets
Problem
If you had a question about online multiplayer, a very niche division of gamedev, you'd have to generally ask these questions among large groups of devs that most have no clue about what you are talking about. Questions in public forums often get buried. When you post questions directly to staff or via support tickets, you often get biased answers that may not truly reflect the situation.
Solution
With the Discord, there's finally a place for this niche space. Every question you ask will have folks that know at least something regarding the topic. With the addition of official ambassadors, this adds some friendly competition that aids to fact checking certain features. With non-staff developers that have used these services before, this allows for transparency and reviews.
