A survey on game backend services

Abstract

The industry of video games is one of the fastest growing sectors in the worldwide economy. One of the key factors to increase engagement and player retention, was the use of various common game concepts such as leaderboards and achievements. The massive use of this approach and the impressive growth of players led to the concept of gamification as a service, later materialized in Game Backend as a Service (GBaaS). Instead of replicating the implementation of the game features in each version of the game for several platforms, GBaaS adhere to a service oriented architecture providing cross-platform game services that lets you easily integrate popular gaming features such as achievements, leaderboards, remote storage and real-time multiplayer in games. This chapter surveys several GBaaS based on the features they offer and on their openness for the integration with computer programming environments.