First of all, I would like to apologize if you couldn't understand what am I trying to ask in the topics since I don't really know how an simple online game was made.

What am I trying to do is something like (example games: Kingdom of Camelot, other FB games) "non-realtime" online games.

Games like Kingdom of Camelot I believe they only store your user data into a server. Same goes to FB games, maybe like Candy Crush they will store your friend's current level and progress.

So my question is what kind of services they are using? I found two platforms:

- Google App Engine

- Purse

Both of them are cloud based but I'm not sure whether it suits my need or not. Can anyone who's experienced in this field give me some guidance?

As in the average price that I need to pay for doing for a game (assuming it's not as big as those big title out there, perhaps 100k of users or maybe 1k active users daily)

Hey mate!

Good question! I won't talk specifically about FB (I have no experience) but I can talk in generality; indeed, these games would need to persist their data, and I'd assume they are using a relational database to do so. There would be many methods to persist data (raw data on disks, relational DBS, non-relational DBS, etc) each one having their own benefits. From the start, it may seem simple; connect a MySQL server, write a forward facing API (ruby, PHP, etc) or an API followed by a multi-tiered architecture, and you're done. No need for heavy weight engines like App Engine.

But - here's the crux - scale can become an issue. Assuming 90% reads, 10% writes on a standard database, you may need to alleviate reading (read replicas, caching) and then writing (sharding, queues), etc. So it becomes quite technical, quite quickly. Of course, this assumes you're doing all this stuff yourself.

Non-realtime games can exploit message queues (RabbitMQ, Amazon's SQS) and coupled with on-demand computing, this can be quite effective on the cloud.

Hope this helps!

Adrian

(Cloud software developer, lead backend dev at https://www.yellloh.com/)