James Gwertzman, the CEO of Playfab.
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PlayFab offers its backend game service for free and launches third-party marketplace

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

PlayFab wants to shake things up in game development, and it is starting by shaking itself up.

Today, the company is making its basic backend services available to game developers for free. PlayFab offloads the work of creating infrastructure for connected online PC and mobile games, allowing developers to focus on making the games themselves. The company hopes this service will become very useful as the $91 billion game market gets more and more complicated.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.