Azure, the multiplayer game platform

PlayFab Multiplayer. © Microsoft.

Microsoft launched a preview of PlayFab Multiplayer Servers, a new Azure-based service that gives game developers tools that ease many things that are normally a tedious aspect of multiplayer game development: managing players’ identities and profiles, matchmaking (pairing similarly skilled players — based on the same algorithms as Xbox Live), rankings, statistics, etc. The service also offers dynamic cloud-based infrastructure: you can assign a number of servers by geographical area and set limits to stop things from getting too expensive. Earlier this year, Microsoft bought PlayFab, a Seattle-based company developing cloud-based tools to support game developers, which at the time were AWS-based.

⇨ Ars Technica, “Microsoft wants Azure to be the multiplayer server solution for every platform.”