Introduction

There are currently two billion gamers across the world that play a wide variety of games on several different devices, including consoles, PCs and Mac’s, smartphones, VR/AR devices, and mobile devices. Furthermore, there is as much interest in video streaming, sharing, and watching within the gaming community as there is in competing or just playing for fun. To meet these demands, game developers have to engage both players and fans by entertaining, sparking imagination, and inspiring them. All this needs to be done in a seamless way or else the goal of engagement will be lost.

 

Microsoft, through its Azure developers, helps game developers achieve their goals by providing a cohesive platform with a robust set of tools that can help them accomplish anything that they imagine. This platform is called Microsoft Game Stack.

Microsoft Game Stack, Azure and PlayFab

Game Stack is a Microsoft initiative that bundles together the company’s different gaming platforms into a robust ecosystem that empowers gaming developers to discover the services and tools that they need to create and operate games.

Before Game Stack, game developers had to work on several different Microsoft gaming platforms, including Visual Studio, DirectX, Xbox Live, Havok, and App Center. With all these platforms, Azure plays a vital role because it provides the essential building blocks such as:

• Compute
• Storage
• cloud-native services (including Azure cognitive services, mixed reality spatial anchors, and push notifications)
• E.g. Azure DDoS Protection
• Visual Studio and Visual Studio App Center. Helps game developers to create high-performance games in Unity, Cocos and DirectX and then publish to over 21 platforms including web, mobile (Android and iOS), PC, Mac, Linux desktop, WebGL, and consoles
• Azure DevOps. Allows game developers to plan, automate, collaborate, and ship with end-to-end modern DevOps services.

It is essential to mention that although Azure is an integral part of Game Stack, Game Stack is still network, device, and cloud agnostic.

Why is Azure a favorite among game developers?

In the pursuit to be more engaging, relevant and ultimately entertaining, games have become increasingly always-on digital services that are powered by client-server architectures. For developers, this means that hosting these games and other operational needs have not only increased but also become incredibly critical for success in the gaming industry.

Azure is valuable for developers because it empowers them in each phase of the development lifecycle from design to deployment and beyond to monetizing, analytics, growth and growing engagement for the games and the brands behind the games.

To be more specific, here are some of the benefits that Azure brings to game developers:

Global presence: Azure is available in 54 global regions and continues to expand beyond these areas with sustainable, highly secure infrastructure and services for developers and specifically for game developers. For example, Project xCloud, which is powered by Azure, will provide streaming technology to gamers and developers regardless of location or device, across the world. For developers, the complexity, cost, time and footprint considerations to bring games to worldwide games is amazingly appealing.

Open platform and interoperability: Azure unleashes developers’ creativity beyond any single database solution, operating system, gaming engine or programming language because it is an open platform.

Security: Azure has amazing in-built security features tools and capabilities so that developers can focus more on creating games and less on security compliance requirements to protect themselves and gamers.

Compute: Azure provides developers with reliability to run games regardless of memory or processing power for AAA games or indie titles, and irrespective of whether they are legacy or modern games.

Data and analytics: Azure delivers analytics, data, and high-availability solutions to game developers.

Networking: Azure developers and engineers not only offer tried and tested networking experience but also a robust network with over 70,000 miles and over 130 edge node locations.

Scalability: Azure allows game developers to scale their infrastructure and services needs with the cyclical requirements of gamers. This helps developers reign in maintenance costs.

Other reasons why Azure is important

• Azure is the first hyper-scale cloud that can provide data, security, identity, management, and an application platform, in one package.
• Azure provides a platform that Windows users are conversant with which means that the learning curve and familiarity with the platform is significantly reduced
• Azure has strong partnerships and commercial agreements with a lot of publishers and service providers, infrastructure/hardware providers in the gaming industry
• Competitive and efficient pricing models allow everyone, from small startups to large enterprise game developer houses, to get the most out of the technologies that Azure provides

Cloud-based development and innovation through PlayFab

In line with Microsoft’s strategy to provide the best tools to game developers, they acquired PlayFab in 2018. PlayFab which has now been branded as Azure PlayFab, provides tools for game developers across all gaming platforms including PC, console and mobile. These tools allow developers to:

• Manage gaming services. These include storing and managing player data, player authentication & linked accounts, commerce, leaderboards, player segmentation, multiplayer services, sending push notifications, create & track virtual currencies, and creating in-game characters.
• Provide real-time analytics. Including full-text event search, real-time monitoring of dashboards, customer engagement reports, debug with real-time event feed, and export data events.
• LiveOps. This includes scheduling tasks, remotely managing game configuration, publishing title news, managing trigger actions from real-time events, storing and distributing game files, and creating custom email templates

Azure tools for cloud developers

Azure developers have provided several cloud tools for game developers that can be accessed through two development paths that include:

• Building from the ground up. Game developers can get full control and creative license of the game development environment using reference architectures and several cloud components including analytics, database solutions, custom server infrastructure, AI and machine learning. Game developers that wish to rump-up their skills in building games from the ground up should definitely consider acquiring Microsoft Azure developer certification.
• Using Azure PlayFab to develop faster. Game-specific managed services are used to operate servers with fewer resources and less effort. This allows game developers to keep code and content fresh, discover monetization opportunities, maximize player engagement, and extend the lifespan of their games.

Over to you

The future is exciting for all game developers that wish to bring to bear the best technologies that the industry has to offer. With Microsoft’s Game Stack and Azure, game developers can quickly transform their dreams, plans and imagination into a reality that gamers and their fans can enjoy. If this is your vision as a game developer, Microsoft Azure developers have certainly done a lot to help you. The ball is now on your court.