Yes it's per game not per user which is absolutely ridiculous and completely unusable. This, along with matchmaking only being available to enterprise users means that GameSparks is completely useless unless you're willing to sign an enterprise contract with Amazon. That might not be too bad but there's absolutely no information on how much an enterprise tier might cost or what their usage limits are. PlayFab is becoming more and more attractive and they now have their SubPub in private preview which gives you a permanent connection so that the server can send messages to the client. I still don't think PlayFab matches GameSparks but they're continually updating their SDK whereas GameSparks has disappeared into a black hole of silence. If I hadn't invested so much time and effort into GameSparks then I'd be going with PlayFab all the way. Amazon doesn't seem to know what they're doing.
I have noticed this throttling happening on the preview environment now. I have to jump through hoops to get everything working on GameSparks coding the API and now you are throttling my service. I am on a LIVE Indy contract and if you start throttling this then I will have grounds for legal action. I put in years of building my product on Gamesparks and if you start to throttle in based on a contract structure I did not sign up to (amazons new way) then this is not the product I signed up to. I used Gamesparks because it gave me room to grow. If I wanted to use Amazon then I would have just built everything on AWS.
Trying to push us on to new contracts by offering 'support' -- there is no GS support and now throttling the service shows you are acting in bad faith.
Tech Support
On 2/19 we introduced self-service pricing and updated usage limits.
By publishing public pricing and Usage Limits, we aim to give you further clarity and flexibility to select the level of performance and pricing that is right for your game. Previously, any customer pushing their game to live was first required to sign a bespoke live commercial service agreement. Our Usage Limits (previously known as Fair Usage Policy) were also unclear and difficult to understand.
Whilst rolling out these changes, we accidentally mapped existing Indie & Student Programme accounts to the Development tier pricing plan instead of honouring their existing agreement. This prevented those impacted from publishing games to the Live environment. We also heard from some customers that the default Preview environment limit of 10 concurrently connected users (CCUs) caused interruptions to development and functional testing.
We apologise for any concern and confusion this may have caused, this was not our intention. We have now increased maximum Preview Environment CCU limit from 10 to 100 players and have mapped all impacted Indie & Student Programme accounts back to a plan that enjoys the same pricing privileges as before the 2/19 changes were introduced. Please see our FAQ or Usage Limits to learn more.
Thank you for partnering with GameSparks to build your game and again, please accept our apologies for this disruption.
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