Microsoft may or may not end up purchasing EA as recent reports seem to indicate, but it seems like they have at least purchased PlayFab, a cloud gaming company. Microsoft corporate vice president of gaming Kareem Choudhry has explained the move as being beneficial to Microsoft’s Azure powered cloud gaming efforts.
“Many industries are moving to the intelligent cloud, and this trend is true in gaming as well,” Choudhry said. “This means an increasing number of developers are looking to create connected games for mobile, PC and console devices that have a significant emphasis on post-launch operations. However, the cost and complexity of achieving this through custom-built, server-side tools and technologies is high, and PlayFab offers developers a compelling model that scales naturally with their games’ players.
“PlayFab’s backend services reduce the barriers to launch for game developers, offering both large and small studios cost-effective development solutions that scale with their games and help them engage, retain and monetize players. PlayFab enables developers to use the intelligent cloud to build and operate games, analyze gaming data and improve overall gaming experiences. The PlayFab platform is a natural complement to Azure for gaming, which provides world-class server infrastructure, allowing creators to focus on building great games with best-available global reach.”
Presumably, Microsoft wants Azure to be the go-to for any company that wishes to invest in cloud gaming in the future; it’s a solid play by them for cloud powered gaming, which was something they tried to push with the Xbox One’s original vision back in 2013, before the overwhelmingly negative response caused them to backtrack on it.
It remains to be seen whether Crackdown 3, which is supposed to be their first true cloud powered game, and which had CloudGine working on it (who were recently picked up by Epic), will get any PlayFab tech.
