The difference is that Azure is an enterprise service. That means that MS will continue to support it for a stupid number of years, just as they did XP.

Look what happened to the games that required GFWL to run..i.e GTA4 for PC no longer work.

1. The servers are free. Microsoft provides them at no cost to the developer. So as long as the Xbox Live (Azure for gaming) server network is still there in a compatible form 20 years from now, Titanfall will still have access to it…for free.

2. The system is designed to automatically scale. They don’t need to dedicate dozens of servers just to Titanfall. If there are thousands of people playing, the system will allocate servers as necessary to support that many people. 5 years from now, if only a few dozen people are playing, the system can dedicate just the number of servers it needs to handle that, and allow the rest of what originally ran Titanfall to run, say, Titanfall 2. BUT, if suddenly there’s a resurgence, and hundreds of people come back to the game, the system can automatically allocate more server space and scale up server size without people having to do a thing. This is the new aspect of Xbox Live cloud that makes it different from everything else. Since its a central place for all games, it can intelligently manage the number of servers each game gets based on current demand. This means no wasted servers, and makes it cheaper for Microsoft and free for developers.