On the eve of GDC 2019, which opens on March 18, Microsoft announced the Game Stack. The latter is a single ecosystem for all the company’s game development solutions.
According to Microsoft, the task of the service is to help teams find suitable tools and services for creating and operating gaming products.
Game Stack “stands” on two pillars:
- Azure is a cloud platform on which all calculations will be carried out, all information will be stored, machine learning, AI services will work, and so on.
- PlayFab is a backend solution for “live” operation purchased by Microsoft last year, with the help of which it is possible to manage the game economy, push, updates, track and analyze information about users.
Mixer, DirectX, Havok, Azure App Center, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code and five more new services from the PlayFab family will also work within the ecosystem:
- PlayFab Party is a service for communication between players by voice and text, which is based on the Xbox Party Chat code. Supports real-time translation.
- PlayFab Game Insights collects telemetry from multiple sources to analyze game performance.
- PlayFab Pub Sub subscribe the game client to PlayFab server messages, which allows real-time updates of the game and sending matchmaking messages.
- PlayFab User Generated Content allows players to create and securely share their own created content. Initially, the service was made for the Minecraft goods market.
Xbox Live is also declared an important component of the Game Stack. As part of the new ecosystem, it becomes a cross-platform solution, including support for iOS and Android (but not Switch, as previously reported).
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