To address the point of &quot;game developers don&#x27;t know backends, and backend developers don&#x27;t know how to build for games&quot;... I want to think aloud about the question &quot;how do you hire engineers who can work on the backend of a large video game?&quot;.<p>One issue parts of the games industry struggle with is simply coding competency. There&#x27;s a tendency to hire newer grads and folks who will work for lower salaries, because people always want to make games. (And why not? Making games is awesome.) This leads to turnover, poorly thought out (or over-engineered) designs, lack of &quot;common sense&quot; things like load testing before launch (remember the industry standards you learned at college? if your college was anything like mine, you didn&#x27;t), language soup, etc. And in my experience, the best backend systems are built by those with at least a bit of that experience already - rather than gameplay programmers trying to teach themselves what the CAP theorem is. But what senior engineer wants to work with legacy spaghetti code, or unlaunched promises (and the threat of future layoffs), when they could work at Facebook or Google or whoever?<p>At a previous large tech company I worked at, we built a games team internally to work on large scale platform stuff (pretty similar to what PlayFab is doing but aligned with said company&#x27;s products). It was really cool - we got folks who were solid engineers but also ex-games industry, or avid gamers, themselves, advertising team openings via the videogames@ internal mailing list. We tried to combine the culture&#x2F;fun of the games industry without the baggage and conditions.<p>But platform isn&#x27;t content, and I recently joined a similar kind of team in an actual games company (which operates much more like a tech company than most, since our game is operated as a live service rather than a one-off downloadable release). Being able to work alongside artists, designers, narrative writers, sound engineers, event producers etc creates a really creative environment, and though I&#x27;m working on MySQL performance tuning and internal monitoring data pipelines, I get to hang out and talk about the new champion releases with folks at lunch. A nice balance, but for those who can&#x27;t afford their own platform team, or don&#x27;t have the carrots to lure us in, PlayFab seem like a neat alternative. :)