A few months ago, we released Firestore for Games into open alpha. Thanks to all of your feedback, today, we’re happy to announce that Cloud Firestore for Games is now publicly available in beta for C++ and Unity developers.
Firestore is a new performant and scalable serverless database option from Firebase for all your game development needs. It can help you add guilds to your latest mobile game, build a backend for your next big turn-based game, or add realtime chat. It’s also a key component of Firebase Extensions like Translate Text and Trigger Email, making it easier than ever to deploy pre-built complex workflows to your games.
What is Cloud Firestore?
Cloud Firestore is Google’s next generation cloud NoSQL database. It’s fast, reliable, and ready to scale for whatever workload you send its way. For the past two years it’s been generally available for the Web, iOS, and Android, and now it’s available for game developers as well.
Cloud Firestore exists alongside our existing Realtime Database. We’ll continue to support Realtime Database because it still works great for when you need to share data quickly with lots of players in near realtime. With Firestore you get more advanced queries on your data, 99.999% guaranteed uptime, and support for up to a million concurrent players — all whilst remaining fast enough for many of your gaming backend needs. If you need more help deciding which database is right for you, check out this helpful guide.
Wasn’t Cloud Firestore already available?
Even though Firestore has been generally available for some time, the existing SDKs were built with the workflows and tools favored by app and web developers. Although game developers working in languages like JavaScript, Kotlin, and Swift would have no problem adopting the existing development kits, you would’ve had to jump through hoops to access them from Unity or C++. However, here at Firebase and Google, we want to make it easy for game developers to build, release, and operate games. So, we’ve built SDKs that bring game developers the same levels of convenience that app developers enjoy.
What’s changed since Alpha?
The Beta tag means that we believe that the Firestore SDKs for Unity and C++ are now stable enough that game developers can confidently use them in shipping games. Bugs and small API tweaks may crop up here and there as more developers pick it up, but Firestore is now a viable option when starting new game projects.
A big improvement that alpha testers might notice is that the new libraries have full feature parity with the platform specific Firestore SDKs. This includes many features alpha testers have asked for, such as OnSnapshotsInSync and support for the Blob data type. All transforms (like incrementing values) and query types (like “array-contains-any”) are now implemented as well. We’ve also worked to make Firestore more consistent with the other Unity Firebase SDKs by ensuring that events fire on the main thread and adding more consistency to error reporting.
Since we’ve seen that many game developers tend to target multiple platforms with a single codebase, we’ve ensured that every feature in Firestore SDK C++ SDK works identically on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. This means that you can develop your game logic on a desktop computer with access to the entire Firestore for games feature set, and remain confident that it will continue to function on your target device. We’ve also fully opened sourced the C++ SDK so you can easily build, debug, and port your code to wherever you need.
How do I get it?
This Firestore beta, like the alpha, ships with the standard Firebase C++ and Unity SDKs. To use it, simply ensure you’re using the latest Firebase SDK either by downloading the C++ zip or the Unity zip.
Don’t hesistate to reach out
Remember, if you come across any bugs, report them to us through our support channel or on the C++ or Unity issue pages.