The new business unit was launched today announced at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. The new head Kim Swift, who worked on the game Portal, among other things, wants to make so-called ‘cloud-native’ games.
That is different from the games that were previously playable via cloud gaming services such as Xbox Game Pass. This still concerns games that were originally designed to simply be downloaded, but which can also be streamed directly from a server via cloud technology.
You don’t have to give up valuable space on your hard drive for a game. With some cloud services you can even play the games directly on a screen without a (game) computer.
Swift calls this form of cloud gaming ‘low hanging fruit’. She is looking for other uses for the technology.
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Children’s shoes
‘Cloud-native’ games are designed in such a way that they must be streamed from the cloud by default, and make optimal use of the data centers in which they are located. This has many advantages: the makers can incorporate cloud technology into their design, such as artificial intelligence, which can perform many more calculations in one fell swoop thanks to the use of multiple servers.
Cloud technology makers also see opportunities to build larger online games that can handle many more players at the same time thanks to the use of many servers. Because cloud-native games are no longer tied to what one (game) computer can handle, much more complex games could be possible in the future anyway.
But cloud gaming is still in its infancy. Although Xbox is not the first party to express these visions of the future, relatively little research has been done on it. So we have to wait for the first real breakthrough.
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