Microsoft and Amazon are battling to entice game developers to the cloud

theverge.com:

Microsoft and Amazon are both appearing at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week with a simple pitch: use our cloud services to build your game. Both companies have been battling to get businesses to switch to the cloud in recent years, and now the focus is truly on game developers during a pandemic that has challenged the norms of creating games.

“Every few years, the games industry undergoes a transformation — a reinvention of itself,” says Sarah Bond, corporate vice president of game creator experience and ecosystem at Microsoft. “New platforms and new technologies make way for new genres, new gameplay and new IP. Today, we’re in the midst of one of those transformative moments.”

Amazon agrees. “Game developers are embracing industry-wide transformation,” says Chris Lee, head of game tech services at Amazon.

While Microsoft and Amazon have been trying to entice game developers over to their cloud services for years, they’re both making an even bigger push in 2022. Amazon is launching AWS for Games today, a collection of AWS services and solutions that will help developers build, test, and even grow their games. At the same time, Microsoft is launching Azure Game Development Virtual Machine to allow developers to build games on powerful PCs in the cloud.

Game studios, both big and small, have struggled to shift to remote game production, and in the early days of the pandemic, developers had to learn how to make games from home. That’s led to stories of developers lugging huge gaming PCs and testing rigs home, a frantic rush to get laptops for developers, or even studios like Bungie relying on Google Stadia to test big game releases like Destiny 2: The Witch Queen remotely.

Amazon already offers cloud game