Microsoft wants to take control of a larger part of the video game industry with its Azure cloud platform. For that purpose, the company has unveiled Game Stack, a suite of developer tools created specifically for that market.
The bundle combines services from Azure with other Microsoft products, including a highly upgraded version of the PlayFab platform that Microsoft acquired last year, reports Silicon Angle. PlayFab offers a set of cloud-based building blocks for developing online games. It includes tools for handling user account management and other essential tasks, as well as more specialized features such as a leaderboard system that can track players’ scores.
Microsoft has added five new services to PlayFab with the introduction of Game Stack, several of which use Azure. One tool is called PlayFab Party and offers voice and chat features with automated translations driven by the cloud platform. Another service, Game Insights, uses the Azure Data Explorer analytics engine to help developers gain insights from data generated by players.
PlayFab can now further support games that allow users to generate their own content, automatically organize multiplayer games and handle content updates as push notifications.
Vision
Microsoft’s vision is to connect PlayFab with its more general software development products, in a coherent, integrated toolkit under the Game Stack umbrella. This vision does not only apply to the services on Azure, but also to other solutions such as the Visual Studio code editor. The company has launched a new plugin for the editor, which allows developers to directly access PlayFab and update scripts hosted there.
This vision may help Microsoft to stay ahead of competitors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS now has an extensive collection of services for the development of games, such as a specialized hosting platform to support online gaming experiences.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.