Making games is more accessible than it ever has been. There's now a myriad of game engines to choose from, most of them for free, and an equally important accessibility of storefronts in the PC space. Between Steam, Epic Games Store and Itch.io, among others, the barriers to publishing a game have been hugely reduced.
And not only are games simpler to make and publish, but the range of creations you can easily make is wider than ever. For a long time, aspiring developers would perfect their craft with 2D platformers and Flash games, but now the improved accessibility of tools means they can be much more ambitious, much earlier. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a good example of that evolution, initially created by Brendan Greene because he found the multiplayer games he was playing too repetitive.
But there's one aspect of making games that has still a long way to go in terms of its accessibility: building backend services, managing multiplayer features, maintaining servers, creating matchmaking services, hosting and analysing players data, and everything that goes into running a live, multiplayer game.
As noted by Linode's Will Blew in a recent GamesIndustry.biz Academy guide to building your back-end in the cloud: "Making the right choices around how you run and support your game over time can be daunting, but there are lots of options available to help."
One of those options is PlayFab, a back-end live ops tech company acquired by Microsoft exactly three years ago. Now operating as Azure PlayFab (Azure being Microsoft's cloud platform), it's keen to conquer more of the industry.
"PlayFab has grown almost ten times since [the acquisition], in terms of both the number of monthly active players, [and] the number of games on the platform," says James Gwertzman, PlayFab co-founder and now Microsoft's general manager for cloud gaming. "All of Microsoft's first party studio games are now on Playfab. We get to host Minecraft, Halo, Gears of War and the new Flight Simulator, and I literally get a visceral thrill every time I see a game using one of our services.
"How do we ultimately deliver that platform that Phil [Spencer, head of Xbox] sold me on, to help the world's game developers be more successful with their games? I'm now responsible not just for PlayFab, but also for Azure, and frankly any [Microsoft] service in the game development space. My job is basically to figure out what game developers need, work across all of Microsoft to deliver it, whether it's working with Playfab, Xbox, Azure, Dynamics, Teams, and stitch together end-to-end solutions from across Microsoft to the games industry."
Gwertzman is keen to advocate for both Microsoft's cloud and its dev tools, reintroducing its basics to the GamesIndustry.biz Academy, and show how it's bloomed since the acquisition.
The challenges facing Azure PlayFab
Despite running some of the biggest titles in the world, Azure is still somehow less known in the gaming space than Amazon Web Services for instance, which is a challenge Gwertzman will have to tackle as he works on growing the cloud.
"I joke all the time that Azure is the world's best cloud for gaming you've never thought of. I think Azure has a reputation as being a cloud that is really focused on the enterprise. If you're an insurance company, or a big bank, or maybe an agriculture company, then I'm sure Azure is a great cloud, but if you're a game developer, you might think Azure's not the cloud for you.
"And to be honest with you, that's probably going to be the single biggest headwind that we're going to be working on now that I'm in this new role, because I think Microsoft's cloud kind of does have that reputation. And it has a lot to do with where we came from."
He points out that clouds like Amazon's initially targeted startups and entrepreneurs -- early tech adopters that typically include game developers -- and is now trying to figure out how to tackle enterprises and big companies. Microsoft came from the other direction.
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