Game Rant recently got the chance to have a long talk with James Gwertzman, head of cloud gaming at Microsoft. To celebrate the 3-year anniversary of his company's acquisition by Microsoft and its subsequent growth, Gwertzman joined us to talk about the budding of cloud gaming technologies in recent years, the future of gaming tech, and all sorts of fascinating anecdotes and predictions about the ever-growing potential of cloud computing.
One of the most interesting facets of this conversation was Gwertzman's assertion that 'games as a service' is slowly but surely giving way to 'games as platforms.'
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To start out, Gwertzman gave a brief history of how the concept of games as a service has expanded to support entire communities.
Games have been through an evolution in the last few years, even decades, as they’ve become more internet dependent. It used to be you bought a game on a cartridge or CD, you played it, you finished it, and you were done. It was a packaged-goods experience. Then... there were servers that you were on with other players. So half the game was on your PC, and the other half was on a server somewhere....
What’s been happening is that the category of games that depend on servers and internet connectivity has been expanding, and now almost any game you can think of has at least some element of being a service. The game is not just a packaged good, it’s a service, and I would argue that we’re going beyond services and games are now communities.
I would look at Fortnite and say that is a full on community, it’s not just a game, it’s a platform, and you’re doing things in the game like concerts, which are way beyond the reach of just the game itself. Even mostly single-player games are doing this. There’s updates, there’s parts of the game that are personalized, and every player now might have a different experience. There’s analytics and data being captured from the game, which you’re using as a game designer to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. You’re not shipping a game every 2-3 years as a developer, you’re constantly updating and revising the game you’ve got with seasons, content, updates.
Still, though, the concept of a game as a platform may sound alien. What exactly does that mean? It made us think of Death Stranding, a game in which players could build infrastructure that would appear in others' worlds, until the community as a whole had changed the landscape of the game. We asked Gwertzman: Do you think the future of games as a platform also involves people building the games themselves?
Absolutely. 100%. I think one of the things we’re going to change here at Microsoft in the coming months is that we’re going to talk less about game developers and more about game creators. The reason is that we really do believe that the class of who is making games has been broadening over time. It used to be only AAA, now there’s indies, and now we’re in a new generation and we’re in for more citizen developers. The average player can also now be a developer. Maybe it’s a simple as making a texture map and selling it, maybe it’s as complicated as making a whole level and adding it on to the world, but we’re putting these creative tools in the hands of the masses.
I don’t want to sound old, but kids these days are so facile with technology and creative tools. A generation that naturally sees computers as creative tools has no problem playing a game and then flipping the bit and creating in the same environment. We’re gonna see more of that. I’m excited for that, and for us, there’s an opportunity to take all of these services I’ve described and make them available all the way down to citizen creators.
Gwertzman's talk isn't just empty speculation about the future, either. Microsoft already powers Minecraft Realms, a service through which players can rent server space on the cloud and host their own persistent Minecraft worlds. Gwertzman gave another great example:
Microsoft-PlayFab is powering the analytics platform inside of Roblox. Roblox realized that one of the basic building blocks of any live game is analytics, so you can tell what players are doing. It’s expensive and hard to do but you have to do it. We have an off-the-shelf solution for that, so now the average Roblox developer can get access to that data and use it to figure out what’s going on with their players. There will be more and more opportunities to make professional-grade services available to players everywhere.
The kinds of services and tools that Microsoft has in mind for the future will likely allow for creativity on a staggering scale, especially if those tools can be placed in the hands of active, enthusiastic gaming communities. Gwertzman's optimism seems well-founded too, as the growth of cloud gaming tech continues to expand under his watch.