This week, Microsoft and PlayFab celebrate their third year together. Since Microsoft acquired the company in January 2018, the community has grown a lot. Not only including developers, but also renowned studios and engineers. James Gwertzman, CEO of Gaming Cloud (Azure, PlayFab, GitHub, etc.) has spoken about it.
The PlayFab Awards, Microsoft’s link with the industry
For those unfamiliar, Azure PlayFab enables game developers and designers to create and operate games with a single platform. PlayFab is the key to accessing LiveOps’ myriad of game, analytics and data services and tools. This allows you to launch a game earlier, extend the life cycle of a game and reduce costs. It also supports LiveOps services and multiplayer environments on all platforms, including Xbox, PlayStation, Stadia, PC, and mobile devices. Games like Minecraft, as well as Roblox and SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off use Azure PlayFab.
According to Gwertzman, since PlayFab joined Microsoft, the number of individual titles using Azure PlayFab has skyrocketed almost 9 times. Active users playing games that take advantage of Azure PlayFab services have also grown almost 9 times. Additionally, PlayFab’s scalable services supported more than 129,000 requests per second (RPS) as of December 2020.
For example, in Minecraft, it is used to bolster your in-game market and scale your evolving customer experiences. And, in Roblox, it is used to offer analytics as a service to the main developers of the Roblox platform. Additionally, Doom Eternal, Rainbow Six Siege, Sea of Thieves, Dirt 5, and No Man’s Sky rely on this service for their global reach.
With all this popularity in mind, it also announces the launch of the PlayFab Anniversary Awards. The awards will honor amazing independent studios. If you still have questions, you can consult their website for more information.
In addition, it announces that from January 29 they will make their Party plugin for Unity available for developers who create games for Nintendo Switch, Sony PlayStation 4 and 5, Android and iOS. This is also in addition to the Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S, and Windows PC platforms that are already supported. “This means that developers can seamlessly and effortlessly integrate a game with Unity across platforms, attracting and connecting more players and driving more interaction with their games,” said James Gwertzman.