I'm working on a cross-platform multiplayer game (windows, mac and mobile) and I've decided that I want to store some basic information about a player that will persist so that next time they play they can continue on. For example, storing a value to represent the player's level or storing which abilities the player has unlocked. I don't want to store this stuff locally as I want the player to be able to access it from any device and also use it in a multiplayer game. I'm wondering if anyone can recommend any backend services that I could use for something like this. I've started Googling around, but thought others here might also have some advice. Thanks.

There exists game-specific API services that do this (and more) for a fee. For example, Gamedonia, or Parse.

There also exists "platform" services like Google App Engine and Joyent that make it easy to build this kind of service on your own and host it in the cloud.

Finally, there exists cloud providers that just provide hardware (virtual or real) and you can build your own service on top of it using C++ or node.js or PHP or whatever. Interserver.net will let you have a virtual machine slice for $6/month; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has instances from "micro" to "super extra double large" with varying capacity, etc.

There's a real smorgasboard of options, and your main question is how much you want to control everything yourself, versus using something that someone else already designed and built.

Thanks for the reply. That is my conclusion also after some research.

I am most interested in the first option however of finding a service that handles it all for you. My requirements I pretty simple, i.e. it would end up just being a handful of integer values I need to store per player that can be recalled again next time they play.

I will look into the two options you listed. If anyone else knows of any other services I would love to hear of them too. Thanks guys.