Xbox has unveiled a new publishing division focused on ‘cloud-native’ games

videogameschronicle.com:

Xbox Game Studios Publishing has officially announced its new “cloud gaming organisation”.

According to Microsoft, the division “works with studios to develop cloud-native titles and bring them exclusively to the Xbox ecosystem”.

The division is led by Kim Swift, who joined Xbox last year as cloud gaming director.

Swift rose to prominence as the project lead and designer of Valve‘s Portal, before working as a designer and artist on Left 4 Dead and its sequel, and was more recently game design director at Stadia.

In a presentation video aimed at developers (which can be viewed above), Swift explained that the division’s mandate is to “partner with world class game development teams to develop cloud-native games to bring unprecedented experiences to players that can only be achieved with cloud technology”.

The concept of ‘cloud-native’ games differs somewhat from simply streaming games to a player’s display using something like Game Pass or PlayStation Now.

While technically this counts as ‘cloud-native’ because it relies on remote servers, these servers are still mainly running games that were designed for home consoles, which would provide identical performance if installed locally.

Instead, ‘cloud-native’ games use the cloud to process certain parts of the game, such as physics, lighting, environments or AI. This has a number of potential uses, such as freeing up processing power on a home console, or making sure that players joining an online world can all get the same synchronised experience.

An early example of this is the multiplayer ‘wrecking zone’ mode in Crackdown 3, which uses the cloud to process destruction physics, allowing players to blow up enormous buildings into countless small pieces with no drop in performance.