Microsoft introduces Game Stack, brings Xbox Live to Android and iOS

Microsoft has announced a new initiative, Microsoft Game Stack, which brings together Microsoft tools and services that will empower game developers. According to the company, the Game Stack brings together all of our game-development platforms, tools, and services—such as Azure, PlayFab, DirectX, Visual Studio, Xbox Live, App Center, and Havok—into a robust ecosystem that any game developer can use. The goal of Game Stack is to help you easily discover the tools and services you need to create and operate your game. The cloud plays a critical role in Game Stack, and Azure fills this vital need. Azure provides the building blocks like compute and storage, as well as cloud-native services from machine learning and AI, to push notifications and mixed reality spatial anchors. Already with Azure, companies like Rare, Ubisoft and Wizards of the Coast are hosting multiplayer game servers, safely and securely storing player data, analyzing game telemetry, protecting their games from DDOS attacks, and training AI to create more immersive gameplay. While Azure is part of Game Stack, it’s important to call out that Game Stack is cloud, network, and device agnostic. The next piece of Game Stack is PlayFab, a complete backend service for building and operating live games. Together, Azure ...