Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud debut comes with upsides for devs
Today Microsoft is announcing the debut of Asobo Studios' Microsoft Flight Simulator on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming--an announcement that wouldn't normally catch our eye but for one additional fact.
In addition to launching the game on its subscription platform, Microsoft is debuting a series of new APIs for game developers working on games that use cloud computing to offload storage and processing to external servers. It's a move that Microsoft says can help make more "cloud-aware" games that take advantage of cloud-computing technology be playable with cloud computing tech.
These APIs can help developers make automatic user interface adjustments depending on what type of device is streaming their game, it includes expanded options for touch controls for non-mobile games, and developers can access techniques and features developed to help Microsoft Flight Simulator run on Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Speaking to Game Developer, Xbox Cloud Gaming vice president and head of product and strategy Catherine Gluckstein and principle program manager lead Jordan Cohen explained why Flight Simulator's cloud debut was such a technical achievement. Making games work on Cloud Gaming is generally implemented by a process called "lift-and-shift," where the Cloud Gaming team gets developers' games running on Microsoft's Azure server network, and makes sure they're compatible with the Cloud Gaming application.
In this process, there's little that the original development team has to do to optimize the cloud-friendly version of their game. But this process works because the Azure servers can be thought of as just a different kind of Xbox. If a game is already engineered to work on one platform, the focus can be just be on moving where
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