I was a lead for a major competitor for Google Drive for awhile.<p>Yes, using a cloud storage provider might work instead of running your own database...<p>> Have you found a way to make this work with multi-player?<p>... But this is where you will run into serious problems.<p>"Cloud drives" aren't designed for highly concurrent multi-user access. That is when you need an ACID-compliant database; (or otherwise understand this issue well enough that you know what you're doing.)<p>In our case, our API was based around light usage of files: If two people edited the same file at the same time, we couldn't resolve the conflict automatically, because these were files: We had no knowledge of the files' schemas.<p>Likewise, our APIs weren't designed for "live" high-performance usage. In our case, if it took under two minutes for an update to sync, we were happy. That's an eternity in a multi-player game.<p>In general, if your application is going to use a cloud drive as its data storage, you should target light usage of storage needs: IE, the user's data is generally private, the user is generally generating light changes, multi-user usage doesn't require heavy "live" data.<p>IE, this would work great for a password manager that allows sharing passwords via the cloud drive's existing sharing system. It would also work great for an online image editor, sheet music editor, anything where you could envision a desktop app that edits files.