On the sidelines of the announcement of the new ID@Azure program, another news item around cloud gaming has also appeared. Indeed, a new cloud gaming entity is created within Microsoft. At its head, Kim Swift, director of cloud gaming since her arrival at Xbox last year. She made a name for herself above all by having been a project manager and designer on Portal as well as Left 4 Dead.
Build cloud-native experiences
This division should “to partner with world-class development teams to create cloud-native games to deliver unprecedented experiences to players”. The notion of “cloud native” differs from streaming a Game Pass game. Although we use the term in this case, because it depends on remote servers, these are games designed primarily for consoles. Here, it would be a question of using the cloud to manage certain aspects of a title such as lighting, physics or environments.
An example that we have already seen in the past of this type of use is the demolition mode in Crackdown 3. Taking advantage of the computing power of the cloud, players can thus destroy large buildings without a drop in performance. And that’s pretty much the only example we have to date. Swift also points out in her presentation that the technology is still in its infancy.
Back when Netflix was created, internet speeds weren’t sufficient to send packets fast enough to support streaming. So they sent physical packages in the mail, in the form of DVDs, and had to wait for technology to catch up with their vision. But they were ready to do it.
According to her, the cloud will be used in three fields of activity: artificial intelligence, real-time calculations and ubiquity. If the first two are quite evocative, the third is more cryptic. For Swift, it’s about the ability to stream games to any device, even if the device isn’t powerful enough to run them natively.
After the announcement last week of new cloud computing technology at Ubisoft, the race seems to be on to democratize the necessary tools and resources.