Hi folks,

We at brainCloud, like many of you, have been following the Stop Killing Games movement with interest.

I am interested in what you think of it?

We are all in a similar spot I suppose -- caught in the middle!

As gamers - we love games - and it's awful when a game you love (or never had a chance to love) gets shut down and becomes unavailable to play.

As game developers (trying to make a living at this for us and our families) - any handcuffs to how we all work to make a living feels like overreach.

I definitely respect what the movement is trying to do. That said, I don't think many of the influencers that have jumped on board appreciate the technical complexities involved. We are far from the days of simply self-hosting a multiplayer server from home.

That said - how the backend is built (and what it's used for) has an impact. Custom solutions are often single-purpose and heavy - and of course require full-time devops and software maintenance to keep things running. This costs mucho $$$.

But that's where services like brainCloud come in.

Unlike custom-developed server solutions, brainCloud costs are elastic - scaling with the player count. And there's $zero cost for personnel to operate and maintain the backend - as the brainCloud team takes care of all that.

Which means that games can be operated for a much longer period of time before studio's need to make the hard decision to shut them down.

Take Anthem, for example - a game reportedly still drawing 15K daily players, yet slated for shutdown. Obviously, it's a AAA game with custom tech, but it illustrates a point: many games still have life and loyal players, but not enough revenue to support full-time ops and maintenance teams.

But on brainCloud? No problem. Our elastic pricing model is designed to scale with your player base — from indie games with just a few thousand users (on plans starting at $15/month) to larger-scale titles with millions of monthly players. And because brainCloud handles the backend operations for you, there’s no need for dedicated DevOps/Maintenance teams. As player activity (and revenue) naturally declines over time, costs decrease as well, helping studios preserve the long tail without breaking the bank.

Which is to say that I think gamedevs are being responsible, and are aligned with the spirit of Stop Killing Games, by using elastic BaaS services like brainCloud for their backend. We know that your games are your babies - and you want to see them live on...

Which is why we are also investigating the possibility of offering Sunset plans for games -- so that gamedevs who find that their games no longer warrant active development can better afford to keep them up and running (at low player counts) for players to continue to enjoy.

Anyway - I'm interested to hear your thoughts!

Paul.

And... the upgrade is complete.

Hopefully a non-event for everyone!

Reach out to support if you see any weirdness!

Cheers,

Paul.

Reminder that the upgrade starts tonight -- and a note that we've bumped up the time.

So we'll be starting the upgrade process at 6:30pm Eastern... (not 8pm as previously announced).

Also note that the upgrade will be performed in two stages:

Stage 1 - We upgrade from MongoDB 6 -> 7

• Should take 25 - 35 minutes
• We'll wait for 5 minutes after it's complete.

Stage 2 - We upgrade from MongoDB 7 -> 8

• Should again take 25-35 minutes.

Hopefully all complete by 8pm Eastern.

Paul.

Hi folks,

MongoDB is ending support for MongoDB 6.0 at the end of July, so we will upgrade all environments to MongoDB 8.0 by that date.

The upgrade of the Public BaaS is targeted for Monday, July 7th.

The official notice can be found link text.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns!

Paul.

Oh - and one thing that wasn't in the release notes... we bumped up the Design Portal session timeout -- so if you go away from the portal and come back to it later -- there's a better chance that you can pick up from where you left off (instead of being booted and having to re-login).

<crickets>

D'oh! We get it - we're all busy - and some folks are shy.

That said - the more feedback we get, the better we understand what features the community is looking for! (We've got plenty of features queued and/or in development - but it's prioritizing them that's the real trick.)

So let us know what works and what doesn't!

For example, is the Self-Service Account Deletion useful? Or were you all just planning to handle it manually, making it less important?

Paul.

Hi folks,

We have just released brainCloud 5.7 - and are eager to hear what you think!

Do you like the new Team Dashboard?

The new Node Usage pane in the Server Monitor?

How about the Self-Service Branding and Account Deletion Features? Are they useful?

Full details on the release here.

We are eager to hear your thoughts!

Paul.

Ah! Thanks for letting us know!

HI @francesco-lenolli - definitely log into our support chat to provide that information. Thanks.

Hi Francesco,

Thanks for reaching out. Certainly our screens and documentation for Promotions could use some more love - we are working on that.

To answer your questions:

Can Users have more than one promotion active at the same time?
Yes. And in that case, the "lowest" price for an item wins.

In the case of automated promotions, what products count towards the "max purchase" limit? If I have a product with the price left "as is" in the Prices list inside that Promotion, does it get counted? More info on this max purchase field would be appreciated.
Hmm - I'm putting a question into the devs on this one.

I have two automated promotions enabled and a User is in the segments used by both, but I don't see them when using the GetElegiblePromotions call. Is this a refresh issue? And if so how do I force a refresh to see them immediately?
Automated promotions are tricky - as a user must "ENTER" the segment to trigger the promotion. If they are already a member of the segment at the time the promotion is created, the automated promotion will not trigger. We are currently improving the user promotions screens to better communicate this behavior - and make it easier to test.

If I have a promotion active where a product is set "not for sale", I don't see that product in the app store, which is the expected behaviour. What if I have another promotion active at the same time where that product is set as available?
What do you mean "as available" - with a particular price? If you mean "as is" I'm pretty sure that "Not for sale" will win - and the product will not being shown.

What if the same thing happens but in promotion #1 the product is "as is" and in promotion #2 it's set with another price value?
Lowest price wins. If promotion #2 is less than the "as is" price than it should be the one shown.

I hope that helps - we'll chime in with more clarifications once I have them from the devs.

Paul.

Okay - cool!

The time format is "epoch millis". (At the lowest levels that's how brainCloud's API deals with time).

An example would depend upon the client library you are using? Unity? Unreal?

I'll let the client team chime in with the details once we know what you are using.

Cheers!

Paul.

สวัสดี ต้องขออภัย แต่เราให้บริการช่วยเหลือเป็นภาษาอังกฤษเท่านั้น

[Hi. Apologies - but we only provide support in English.]

You are welcome. Thanks for the suggestion!

Hi Lee,

We hear you. I'll raise it with the devs.

Paul.

But why the random list of groups? Is this presenting a random list of groups to a player - so they can decide which one to try to join or something?

So - like GetPlayersSocialLeaderboard() - the app would provide the subset list of groups that they are interested in?

Should be simple enough to add. Curious though - what's your use case? How do the list of groups you want to see relate?

We agree with that @antony - we'll get that request to the devs.

Hi @antony - I'll send that one off to the devs and see how that would affect the implementation.

We'd likely make it a separate call - as that's a heavier operation that just returning your friends in relative order. That said - if you have to do it manually yourself that's a LOT heavier on the servers -- so I agree that this new call would be beneficial.

Stay tuned!

Hi folks,

FYI, here's one minor update regarding the Retention Analytics screen:

We have changed it to show Classic retention by default.

The reason for the change is that Rolling Retention naturally trends downward over the 30-day period of the report. That's simply due to mathematics. Rolling retention for a particular day measures whether the user returns that day - or any day thereafter. Thus - the days at the end of the calendar period have fewer days after them - and so the stat will naturally be lower.

We don't want folks to mistakenly think their retention is trending down - so we're now defaulting to Classic Retention which is more deterministic over the 30 day period. For those who wish to view the Rolling Retention - it's just a mouse click away!

Cheers!

Paul.