Opinion: Microsoft Azure’s partnership with Musk’s Starlink service is going to revolutionize the gaming space—and Xbox will be at the forefront. The partnership was announced in October of last year and is purported to be in competition with Amazon’s space commercialization efforts.
What catches my eye, though—what I frequently discuss on the podcast—is that with Starlink’s promise of global high-speed internet connections, Azure’s cloud capabilities, and Game Pass’s game streaming, Xbox appears positioned to dominate the gaming space. Recently, in fact, Xbox chief Phil Spencer discussed the possibility that tens or hundreds of thousands of players could soon be playing on the cloud.
During the conversation, Spencer said that Xbox is looking toward a future where “game creators will natively be building cloud-based games first.” He also mentioned a future where creators will have “almost unlimited access to the hardware capability that’s available in a data center [and be able to] scale the capabilities of their game up and down.” He went one step further and painted a vision of the future where creators make use of “multiple CPUs and GPUs in the cloud to deliver experiences that no local hardware could unlock.”
Fortuitously, Microsoft Azure has a product that it calls “Blob Storage.” The description of which reads, “Blob storage is built from the ground up to support the scale, security, and availability needs of mobile, web, and cloud-native application developers.” The description also claims, “[It] is the only cloud storage service that offers a premium, SSD-based object storage tier for low-latency and interactive scenarios.”
Microsoft Azure also offers traditional block storage, such as SSD and HDD, along with a host of capabilities such as Data Lakes for analytics and Mixed Reality development assistance. With the ongoing pandemic, game developers have had to work from home, making some development aspects difficult. Microsoft Azure seems uniquely capable of addressing some of those issues.
On Starlink’s end, global low-latency internet connections promise to connect the world in ways that were unimaginable before. Speeds are already reaching over 100Mbps for beta users of Starlink, but Musk expects that speeds will reach the blisteringly fast speed of 300Mb later this year when Starlink is slated to officially go live.
Wireless high-speed internet, which is scalable like Starlink, could change the way that we game forever. This kind of capability could usher in an era where, as Spencer stated, creators are building games on the cloud first—because distribution would be global, nearly instantaneous, and take advantage of abilities that local hardware can’t support.
This would also help developers meet gamers where they already are. According to market research conducted in October of 2020, it was discovered that 72% of console revenue came from digital sales. PC developers were even more reliant on digital sales, with 98% of sales coming digitally. It is clear, then, that more people are interested in purchasing games digitally than picking them up at a store. The problem is that games are also taking up more storage space than your local hardware can handle.
Recently, it was reported that Call of Duty games are reaching the 500GB mark for storage needs. Luckily, the game is modular, so you can uninstall parts of it that you aren’t using, but that solution can quickly become clunky. Specifically because every Call of Duty game will integrate with Warzone—the main source of the storage issue.
While Call of Duty is the worst offender, it’s becoming more and more common to see games approaching the 100GB mark—severely restricting the number of games that you can have installed on your console or PC at a single time.
It seems that the games industry doesn’t just want cloud gaming; it’s becoming a necessity. Microsoft Azure’s partnership with Starlink could be the only feasible solution to that problem—and Xbox, being a Microsoft property, is already first in line to take advantage of it.
That might explain why Phil Spencer is on record saying that he isn’t worried about outselling the PS5.
Sources: GameRant | CNBC | Gamasutra | Microsoft Azure | GamesIndustry.biz
The Wolf's Gameboard 