So if you write your game with Firebase Community Edition (FCE), what happends then? After all, writing a nice game and getting players is only the first step on the journey. Well, basically this is what we’re thinking (and the information here should be taken with a pinch of salt, we’re still thinking).
If you have a sucessfull game on FCE but don’t wan’t to share your source code? There’ll be a Firebase Standard Edition (FSE), identical to the FCE with the exception of a proprietary license.
How about scalability? Well, if you want to, you can sticky-balance sessions across multiple single instances, so in theory you can scale both FCE and FSE, but if you want scalability and high availability included, you can upgrade to the Firebase Enterprise Edition which gives you the entire package.
- FCE -> (success, a couple of thousand players, limited budget) -> FSE
- FCE -> (success, a lot of players, in need of scalability) -> FEE
- FSE -> (success, needs HA and scalability) -> FEE
In terms of support, there’ll be an entire range of options, starting from the Basic Support which will offer a ticketing system for bugs, API and maintenance questions, all the way up to Enterprise Support with full telephone support, dedicated personnel, dedicated development branch and customizes hot-patches etc. But I’ll go through those in a separate post. Stay tuned!