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"We're excited to help you keep your players connected to

June 24, 2017 by Kimberly Parks

"We're excited to help you keep your players connected to the community," said Aaron Swartz, Lead Content Officer for Microsoft's Xbox team. "At PlayFab, we're looking for ways to help you help keep your players connected to the community."

Developers are encouraged to make use of the new services in their games. For example, Microsoft has been working with a lot of other developers to give their games a more user-friendly interface and to integrate more advanced features such as analytics. This is not the only thing that PlayFab has done in the past, though. The company also recently opened up its Azure cloud to Microsoft Game Studios for their upcoming games, a partnership that brings it up to date with the other companies.

"We're excited to be working with Microsoft on the Multiplayer Server and we're delighted to be working with PlayFab," said Sean Anderson, VP of Games. "We're excited to expand out of the cloud into all of our games. We're excited as we're using Azure and to share what we're learning with our developers and our partners."

Microsoft's Azure and PlayFab Multiplayer Servers are part of the company's ongoing push to improve cloud performance. In the past, Microsoft has tried to push its work to its servers, but that effort was largely unsuccessful. Microsoft has continued to focus on high-availability, low-latency games, which is great for games that aren't really growing fast. But in order to help developers, Microsoft has made more of a concerted effort to add features to existing servers. PlayFab is one such effort: this year, Microsoft announced that it is bringing features like advanced analytics and player identification to Xbox Live Gold memberships that allow them to earn points on Xbox Live Gold. The service also allows those who use playbias.com, a service that takes in data analytics from players, for a free subscription. The service has a few limitations: it doesn't work with Xbox Live Gold membership, but it does allow users to earn points for playing a match. However, those who sign up will be able to earn those points based on the current level of play, which is similar to how games on Xbox Live are earning points.

"Our hope is that you'll support PlayFab this way," Anderson said. "We look forward to working with you to increase your gaming experience. We've been working with Microsoft for a while now to bring some of those features into other platforms. We're excited to see how developers and playbias.com users are