Respawn Entertainment is making mecha based first-person-shooter Titanfall for Microsoft platforms. As such, the game is designed to make full use of cloud gaming under Microsoft's Azure servers.
Microsoft has had a hard time communicating the value of these servers to gamers, with the entire enterprise of cloud gaming itself receiving a black eye thanks to the Xbox One used games DRM policy debate. The debate ended for Microsoft when they got rid of these new policies, including requiring 24 hour online check ins, one month after announcing it.
Now, Titanfall engineer Jon Shiring has posted on the official Respawn website to make the case for cloud gaming, and his explanations are easy to understand and compelling. To begin, he writes about the disadvantages of player hosted servers when playing online multiplayer, enumerating multiple real life scenarios which penalize the player host, the other players, or everyone. In contrast, he explains how setting up dedicated servers eliminates all these problems, and then pointing out running those servers would cost money.
Jon eventually points out that Microsoft offered Respawn use of their Azure servers as dedicated servers for Titanfall. Azure servers are scalable, allowing players to enter and leave gaming sessions automatically. Respawn also upsells that Microsoft has global datacenters, will be capable of handling consumer demand even at launch, and has priced use of these servers low.
Jon's explanation doesn't address all concerns from Microsoft's recently axed used games policies, but it does put cloud gaming in a good light. This explanation also does not address questions on whether Microsoft's cloud servers will be used to increase graphical power via server side computations or even if Microsoft has 300,000 servers. What it is is a clean new starting point to explaining the upsides of cloud gaming.
We first covered Titanfall's reveal here.
