[logent]

I've seen two main reasons for this in my experience. The games industry is one where a 'chase the shiny' business mentality requires developers to frequently change their target platforms, development stacks, and desired core competencies for each project. Many of us are jacks of all trades, with little expertise in things like keeping a service standing under incredible load. I've seen developers go into this problem with a 'how bad can it be' mentality, and it never ever ends well.

The other side of things is where you actually have a team capable of delivering a solid, scaling backend service, who simply do not get the chance to do so because of poor production planning and overzealous development schedules handed down from on high. This is not an industry where the engineers get to define the development schedule or feature set. They can influence both, but on many teams the managers expect that crunch will solve all of their scheduling mistakes.

I think you guys at PlayFab are in a great space as this is work that is very difficult to pull off right and many, many developers will (smartly) choose to pay for a solution instead of rolling their own.