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Congratulations! Firebase is very compelling. Personally, I have been trying to determine if I should buy or build a new mobile game backend that has an averag

Congratulations! Firebase is very compelling. Personally, I have been trying to determine if I should buy or build a new mobile game backend that has an average of 50-250K iPhone app downloads/month. I'm adding online multiplayer to an otherwise single-player game. I've looked at Firebase and a number of other offerings include Exit Games' Photon Cloud. Firebase had seemed to be expensive for my use case of ~ 400K MAU. However, Firebase's experience of 1 CCU = ~ 1400 MAU [1] would be easily supported under the "Candle" or "Bonfire" tiers which are not expensive. Exit Games' has a different experience [2] but I'm probably comparing apples to oranges a bit. Games vs Big Brother. Well, there is Roll20 so maybe it's at least comparable experiences. 1 CCU = 1400 MAU vs 1 CCU = 20 MAU That's a big difference. Am I thinking about this strangely? [1] "In our experience, 1 concurrent corresponds to roughly 1,400 monthly visits." https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html#pricing-faq https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html#pricing-faq [2] "To calculate monthly active users (MAU) we assume a CCU to translate into 10 daily active users (DAU) and each of these into 20 MAU" https://cloud.exitgames.com/Pricing https://cloud.exitgames.com/Pricing

Afforess 13y ago
I agree Firebase's plans are poorly worded. If your app just has to sync stuff (and can then disconnect from Firebase) you can have a lot of users and will still only have a few concurrent connections. If your app relies on real-time data with a Firebase connection, you will have a lot of concurrent connections. Source: Been using Firebase beta as a developer for 2 months
mayop100 13y ago
The stat listed on our site is for a typical website. If you have a mobile app, or an atypical website, your mileage may vary. Even for highly engaging, paid apps I suspect you'll find it's in the 100 to 1 range (or more). 1 CCU = 20 MAU is very high. For example, World of warcraft peaked at ~10% of their users online at any one point recently: http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/wow-pandaria-1-million-concurrent-players-in-china/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/wow-pandaria-1-million-con... Also note that we bill at the 95th percentile, not peak usage, so you can spike well above those numbers without consequence. If you want to know how many concurrent users you'll need, sign up, drop in our script, and have your clients connect to Firebase (but do nothing). You'll be able to see concurrent user counts under Analytics in Forge.
- fictorial 13y ago
  That's a valuable data point about WoW; thanks! I like your idea of just adding Firebase and testing the waters. Alas, the next version of my app is a rewrite to Unity3D and there is no Firebase client for Unity3D (yet?) so this amounts to just feeling things out.

Afforess 13y ago

I agree Firebase's plans are poorly worded. If your app just has to sync stuff (and can then disconnect from Firebase) you can have a lot of users and will still only have a few concurrent connections. If your app relies on real-time data with a Firebase connection, you will have a lot of concurrent connections. Source: Been using Firebase beta as a developer for 2 months

mayop100 13y ago

The stat listed on our site is for a typical website. If you have a mobile app, or an atypical website, your mileage may vary. Even for highly engaging, paid apps I suspect you'll find it's in the 100 to 1 range (or more). 1 CCU = 20 MAU is very high. For example, World of warcraft peaked at ~10% of their users online at any one point recently: http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/wow-pandaria-1-million-concurrent-players-in-china/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/wow-pandaria-1-million-con... Also note that we bill at the 95th percentile, not peak usage, so you can spike well above those numbers without consequence. If you want to know how many concurrent users you'll need, sign up, drop in our script, and have your clients connect to Firebase (but do nothing). You'll be able to see concurrent user counts under Analytics in Forge.

fictorial 13y ago
That's a valuable data point about WoW; thanks! I like your idea of just adding Firebase and testing the waters. Alas, the next version of my app is a rewrite to Unity3D and there is no Firebase client for Unity3D (yet?) so this amounts to just feeling things out.