‘Games As Service’ Platform Raises $2.5M

PlayFab, which makes a dashboard that lets online game makers track how much players are spending in their games, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding, the company said on Tuesday (Aug. 19).

The 20 investors included founders and alumni of PopCap, Kabam and Disney. CEO and co-founder James Gwertzman said that close to two dozen game companies had already committed to using PlayFab’s back-end system in their games, with hundreds more in talks, according to Re/code.

The software service eliminates the need for game companies to create their own systems for tracking players’ usage and purchasers. That makes it a useful tool for customer service reps who might reward a high-spending player with free virtual currency, or punish a player who has been reported for abuse by revoking a specific item purchased within a game, Gwertzman said.

The PlayFab dashboard can also be used to schedule a timeline of live events such as a one-day-only sale of a certain in-game item, or to introduce a new item into the game by assigning it the relevant statistics such as damage dealt and rate of fire.

The Seattle company, which was launched in January 2014, charges clients based on their numbers of daily active users, at rates comparable to internally developed software but without the upfront development costs. PlayFab is currently available for iOS, Android, Facebook and PC gaming on Steam, and will soon be available to developers on both Xbox and PlayStation.