Microsoft has created a new division specifically tasked with developing video games designed for cloud gaming The division is headed by Kim Swift, former project lead on Valve’s Portal series and designer of the Left 4 Dead franchise.
It’s all about video games native for cloud gaming, titles designed from the ground up to be reproduced in streaming, and therefore able to take advantage of all the opportunities that this technology can offer. “We’re thinking of gaming experiences that are unprecedented in the industry,” Swift explains in a video aimed at developers and industry insiders.
Today, video games are available on services such as xCloud and Google Stadia are largely intended for consoles and mainstream games. In other words, they work like a normal game with a code that needs to be interpreted and played locally by a machine.
Rather, Microsoft thinks of games with a different architecture: from physics to lights, traversing randomly generated environments and AI behaviors, everything is managed in the cloud. The possibilities are endless and almost completely unrelated to the computing power of consoles.
We saw a taste of this concept in the Crackdown 3 multiplayer mode, where building destruction is handled by the cloud. Translated: in the game it is possible to burn huge buildings to ashes without the slightest hint of performance loss. The cloud manages these complex operations, not the console GPU.
The cloud opens up new possibilities for developers, who can put precious technologies such as machine learning at the service of their video games
said Kim Swift.
Source: Lega Nerd
