As we have reported over the last week, Microsoft is ramping up visibility on its upcoming Project xCloud Azure-powered gaming service. Just a couple of days after releasing a first live demo of xCloud in action, Microsoft has debuted Microsoft Game Stack.
This new service combines cloud services such as PlayFab, Mixer, Xbox Live, Power BI, and Azure. There are also some development solutions thrown into the bundle. Designed for developers, Microsoft Game Stack is an important service because it debuts the sale of PlayFab services.
Microsoft acquired the cloud-connected gaming platform in January 2018. PlayFab is a cloud-based company that provides game management and analytics solutions. Among its services are virtual currency tracking, leaderboards, authentication, commerce, and more.
With its availability in the Microsoft Game Stack, PlayFab is gaining five new services in preview:
- PlayFab Matchmaking: Powerful matchmaking for multiplayer games, adapted from Xbox Live matchmaking, but now available to all games and all devices.
- PlayFab Party: Voice and chat services, adapted from Xbox Party Chat, but now available to all games and for all devices. Party leverages Azure Cognitive Services for real-time translation and transcription to make games accessible to more players.
- PlayFab Game Insights: Combines robust real-time game telemetry with game data from multiple other sources to measure your game’s performance and create actionable insights. Powered by Azure Data Explorer, Game Insights will offer connectors to existing first- and third-party data sources including Xbox Live.
- PlayFab Pub Sub: Subscribe your game client to messages pushed from PlayFab’s servers via a persistent connection, powered by Azure SignalR. This enables scenarios such as real-time content updates, matchmaking notifications, and simple multiplayer gameplay.
- PlayFab User Generated Content: Engage your community by allowing players to create and safely share user generated content with other players. This technology was originally built to support the Minecraft marketplace.
Project xCloud
Xbox Project xCloud is a cloud-based game streaming service Microsoft is currently developing. With this service, Microsoft will store all game performance and data in the cloud, allowing gamers to play without system or hardware limitations. This means gamers will be able to access Xbox games across platforms and on any device, even mobile.
