playMaker

Author Topic: Official Playmaker plugins?  (Read 633 times)

Broken Stylus

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Official Playmaker plugins?
« on: May 11, 2023, 09:51:58 AM »
The success of Playmaker depends a lot on its capacity to work in harmony with the idea of what Unity stands for as a multi-platform middleware. It is therefore necessary to guarantee that each single platform will work flawlessly in accord with the most usual and recurring suite of tools used on them, so that each Playmaker customer can be reassured that the only limit to the production and publishing of a project is merely one's imagination and one's skills in Unity and Playmaker.
Today, it is almost unthinkable to publish a game on mobile without looking into advertisement, in-app purchases, analytics, game services and other crucial functions of that order.
A few years ago, several paid options were available to Unity users and most of these options came with a support for Playmaker. From the top of my head, there were three plugins that covered most of the bases for this.
Despite putting Playmaker in a precarious position, the existence of multiple plugins that provided a support for native and less native functions made sure that one could consider relatively safely publishing on mobile, with Playmaker, without encountering any issue.
This, of course, largely meant that Playmaker was heavily depending on the will of these plugin makers to accept adding some support for Playmaker.
But as we know, depending on third party plugins is risky as they can be abandoned in a heart beat, and double so because typical Playmaker users cannot even rely on coding skills to integrate functions and SDKs. To do so requires some coding abilities, which in a large part runs contrary to the spirit of what Playmaker offers to the users who didn't approach software production from a coding perspective but a design or artistic one.

For all sorts of reasons, the moderate abundance of plugins has perished to the point that perhaps one single plugin remains today with a support for Playmaker and there is no telling how long this will be maintained. In other words, without such a support for Playmaker, this tool finds itself locked out of most of the mobile ecosystem.
Not only do I think that Playmaker should have a clear and full support for all of Unity's systems (what are called Unity Services) and even moreso since the merger with Iron Source, I also believe that the Playmaker staff should seriously consider developing its own official plugins. Let them be paid, this would be necessary. It doesn't matter if most of a plugin's content consists of PM actions predominantly as long as there is a definitive statement by the Playmaker staff of a desire to provide an official support for the typical mobile functions and services mentioned earlier on in this post.
When it comes to analytics, several companies provide such services and I say that there too, a package gathering most of these solutions and letting a user pick any of these and use it through Playmaker would make a fine plugin.
The same could go for the Unity Services, with producing officially Playmaker-friendly paid plugins.
Eventually most of these plugins' classes may be public and accessible to coders anyway, which would allow these plugins to be sold without requiring Playmaker, maybe. But the important point here is that Playmaker would officially come forth as providing support for what have grown to be popular and crucial functions on some platforms, so much that any would be user of Playmaker can safely consider looking into Hutong Games' tool without fearing of being at the mercy of a third party plugin editor that would suddenly drop dead without further notice.
« Last Edit: May 13, 2023, 04:45:45 PM by Broken Stylus »