Microsoft is serious with cloud gaming: Xbox Game Studios Publishing has announced the opening of a new division, entirely dedicated to cloud-native games. Leading it was former Valve Kim Swift, famous for Portal and Left 4 Dead, who joined the Redmond company last year as cloud gaming director.
The rumors about Microsoft’s interest in cloud gaming were now more and more insistent, so much so that the news is very surprising. There is also talk of an exclusive game by Kojima Productions for the Microsoft cloud, news not yet confirmed.
However, Xbox Game Studios Publishing presented the new division with a video, aimed at developers, where Swift explains how the goal of the project is to collaborate with first-class developers around the world to create cloud-native games to give to gamers experiences that can only be achieved via the cloud.
Although many might immediately think of platforms such as Stadia or Xcloud as examples of already active cloud gaming, it should be noted that the differences between a game developed exclusively for the cloud and one developed for other systems and run in the cloud are substantial.
A native game can in fact exploit the cloud to process certain aspects of the game, such as physics, lighting, environments and artificial intelligence, to have much more advanced results and make sure that all connected players have the same. experience.
According to what was said in the video, cloud gaming is still in its infancy, but its future will develop along three lines: ubiquity, cloud artificial intelligence and runtime calculation. The first is the ability to stream games to any device, even the less powerful ones.
Cloud artificial intelligence, on the other hand, will make it possible to take advantage of machine learning, natural language processing and reinforcement learning, to have more convincing non-player characters and to give developers advanced development tools. Finally, runtime calculations can be used to improve rendering, AI, procedural element generation and special effects.
At this point all that remains is to see what the first cloud projects of the new division will be.