Gameinformer has an interesting article on Xbox One. The article covers many topics but I want to focus on just one. Here’s what he has to say about the cloud capabilities. See if it sounds familiar.
“Both Kinect and Cloud as it relates to indie has been really interesting,” Spencer says. “If you’re a two-person studio, you’re probably not going to invest in a server farm. You won’t know how many to buy or what the scale is going to look like. It’s really hard for those guys. What we’re able to do with Cloud, is say, ‘Here are 300,000 servers. You don’t need to tell us what that demand looks like. You don’t even have to know.’ We will handle the scaling capability on the backend. That has been one of the more interesting uses.”
Scalability benefits of Microsoft’s cloud services could be critical in the MMO and persistent online game spaces. These genres typically has problems at launch because of demand spikes. More flexible scaling provided by the cloud could help alleviate these issues.
Compare this article and instead of Indie Developers and Xbox think small business and any cloud platform like Azure……………It’s exactly the same message. In many ways, using someone else for infrastructure and scalability is a lot like focusing purely on what you do best without having to reinvent the wheel. It will be interesting to see what developers do with a great equalizer. It will be even more interesting to see what impact this will have on the large game developers.
See the entire article for more content on things not cloud but still in the Xbox world.
