{"id":186753,"date":"2021-02-05T21:40:14","date_gmt":"2021-02-05T21:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gamerant.com\/microsoft-head-cloud-gaming-xbox-james-gwertzman-interview\/"},"modified":"2021-02-05T21:40:14","modified_gmt":"2021-02-05T21:40:14","slug":"interview-microsofts-head-of-cloud-gaming-james-gwertzman-talks-past-present-and-future-of-gaming-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/2021\/02\/05\/interview-microsofts-head-of-cloud-gaming-james-gwertzman-talks-past-present-and-future-of-gaming-tech\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Microsoft’s Head of Cloud Gaming James Gwertzman Talks Past, Present, and Future of Gaming Tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Game Rant recently conducted an interview with James Gwertzman, the head of cloud gaming at Microsoft. Gwertzman was a fountain of knowledge and insight, providing a wealth of information on cloud computing, cloud services, and things to come in\u00a0the games industry<\/a>. From the future of machine learning to the history of cloud services, Gwertzman gave us a lot to think about. Considering the success of his company, PlayFab, after its acquisition by Microsoft, he’s probably right in most of his prognostications too.<\/p>\n

Gwertzman spoke with us in celebration of the three-year anniversary of his company’s acquisition by Microsoft<\/a>, during which time it grew nearly 10X. PlayFab was one of the first companies to build cloud services specifically for games<\/a>, providing the backbone for multiplayer components and anything else that requires internet connectivity. At Microsoft, it’s only broadened in scope, and Gwertzman was happy to give examples of how. The following interview transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Microsoft and Sony Are Teaming Up for Cloud Gaming and Streaming<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

GR: ‘Cloud gaming services’ is a term a lot of readers might not be totally familiar with. Can you briefly summarize what you do? What are the goals behind the kinds of projects you work on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: Games have been through an evolution in the last few years, even decades, as they\u2019ve 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…. What\u2019s 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…. and I would argue that we\u2019re going beyond services now and games are now communities….<\/p>\n

Even mostly single-player games are doing this. There\u2019s updates, there\u2019s parts of the game that are personalized, and every player now might have a different experience. There\u2019s analytics and data being captured from the game, which you\u2019re using as a game designer to figure out what\u2019s working and what isn\u2019t. You\u2019re not shipping a game every 2-3 years as a developer, you\u2019re constantly updating and revising the game you\u2019ve got with seasons, content, updates.<\/p>\n

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All of these things, the updates, the personalization, multiplayer, matchmaking, user generated content in the case of Minecraft or Roblox, all of these collectively require stuff that isn\u2019t on your computer, it\u2019s out on a server somewhere. More and more now those servers are not hosted on proprietary datacenters that the company builds itself, they\u2019re hosted on the cloud, hosted by Amazon or Google or Azure…. You can launch a game and suddenly have 10X the players you expected, but as long as you\u2019re in the cloud it\u2019s easy to scale up and scale down again. Games are especially notorious for spiky loads, which makes the cloud attractive because it can scale to meet those workloads.<\/p>\n

Where things are getting interesting is that companies are starting to add levels of services that aren\u2019t just raw compute and storage, but that are dedicated specifically to gaming<\/a>. That\u2019s exactly what PlayFab was. PlayFab was one of the first companies providing a set of services that lives in the cloud that you as a developer could use in your game, and you didn\u2019t have to worry about running the server…. You can use a service like a leaderboard, or our matchmaker, or our analytics, or content updates, or any of those services we offer. You get to just use the service, and it just works without having to worry about updating or managing it.<\/p>\n

GR: So you\u2019re providing a lot of backend infrastructure for the online components of games, and part of the appeal of that is it\u2019s pre-packaged and scalable, so developers can rely on that instead of having to do it themselves.<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: Exactly, and because of that it speeds up development, and as a developer you can focus on the good bits and the fun bits instead of focusing on infrastructure that, frankly, you just want it to work and you don\u2019t want to focus on.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Microsoft is Building Xbox Dev Kits in the Cloud<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

GR: We reviewed Microsoft Flight Sim<\/em>, and one thing that stood out about it is the number of resources that Microsoft put into it. There\u2019s real time weather data, real time commercial flight data, satellite data, you’re streaming in assets as people are playing, and that allows the entire planet to be depicted in a game. Are we going to see more games at that scale? What comes next after a project of that size?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: Well, I love talking about Flight Simulator<\/em><\/a>. In my mind, this is the perfect example of a cloud-native game that would not be possible without the cloud. But I would parse what you said a little more narrowly: it\u2019s not that this is a game that was only possible at the scale of a Microsoft. It was only possible at the scale of the cloud. One of the cool things is you don\u2019t have to be a very big company to be able to use the cloud at that level.<\/p>\n

One of the things this game did that was so remarkable was that it took satellite data from all over the earth… so that AI could take the satellite images and imply geometry, and make up geometry for the whole planet in a way that would have been impossible for humans to do. It would\u2019ve been tens of thousands of artists building the earth in 3D, but the computer can do it. Once you\u2019ve built the model once and it works, once you\u2019ve trained it, you can run the model on the entire earth. And, it only took 72 hours. It took a massive amount of compute power, but that\u2019s the advantage of the cloud. You can grab thousands of servers for 72 hours and then release them when you\u2019re done. That\u2019s expensive, but you don\u2019t have to be a big company to do that. You can lease the data from somewhere and rent the server space.<\/p>\n

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GR: The ability to render an entire planet in 72 hours is incredible. Will we see it again?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: First of all yes, we will see more projects of that scale…. I think what\u2019s gonna happen is you\u2019re gonna start to see specialization of the value chain. I\u2019ve often said, for example, that the world of Red Dead Redemption,\u00a0<\/em>the amount of effort that Rockstar put into that, and to only use it for one game almost feels like a waste. It\u2019s almost like you want to build that entire world and then have multiple games in that world. I could see a company emerging that only builds worlds, and then other companies can just lease or rent out the world for other games.<\/p>\n

Look at a game like Cyberpunk<\/em>. Part of the cost of building that game was building the whole world out. What if someone else built the world, and you just borrowed it like a backlot at a movie studio and had a live updated version for your game? We\u2019re already seeing things like that with Roblox<\/em>, with mods, with Minecraft<\/em>. On one level these are games but they\u2019re also\u00a0platforms for building other games<\/a>.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Microsoft Flight Simulator Developer Interested in Bringing the Game to the Cloud<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

GR: You talk a lot about games as a platform and a community. You also just mentioned mods, and games in which players make a lot of their own content. Do you think the future of games as platforms also involves people building the games themselves?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: Absolutely. 100%. I think one of the things we\u2019re going to change here at Microsoft in the coming months is that we\u2019re 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\u2019s indies, and now we\u2019re in a new generation and we\u2019re in for more citizen developers. The average player can also now be a developer. Maybe it\u2019s a simple as making a texture map and selling it, maybe it\u2019s as complicated as making a whole level and adding it on to the world, but we\u2019re putting these creative tools in the hands of the masses.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m excited for that. And for us, there\u2019s an opportunity to take all of these services I\u2019ve described and make them available all the way down to citizen creators. One example is Roblox<\/em>…. Microsoft-PlayFab is powering the analytics platform inside of Roblox<\/em>.<\/a> It\u00a0realized that one of the basic building blocks of any live game is analytics, so you can tell what players are doing. It\u2019s expensive and hard to do, but you’ve got to do it. We have an off-the shelf-solution for that, so now the average Roblox<\/em> developer can get access to that data and use it to figure out what\u2019s going on with their players. There will be more and more opportunities to make professional grade services available to players everywhere.<\/p>\n

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GR: Everyone in the gaming community has had to pay attention to the rise of Among Us<\/em>, Fall Guys<\/em>, and Phasmophobia<\/em> during this pandemic. Very light, easy to run games that offer an open field for human interaction. That\u2019s similar to a lot of the things that you talk about, so is there anything you think you\u2019ve learned from this big uncontrolled experiment that is the pandemic? A lot of these games were very small and weren\u2019t necessarily trying to be what they became.<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: A couple of thoughts: One is… this is a supporting vote for the cloud. When these games blew up, developers were able to keep it going because of the cloud. A couple years ago a game like Among Us<\/em> wouldn\u2019t have happened<\/a>. They would have stalled out. They would have had five servers, and they would\u2019ve saturated them, taken six weeks to get new ones, and they would\u2019ve lost the opportunity. It\u2019s cool that now the cloud is enabling that kind of runaway growth.<\/p>\n

I agree that games are providing social interactions and opportunities to interact with our colleagues when we can\u2019t in real life. I go to Burning Man every year, and last year I couldn\u2019t go because it was cancelled. They tried to host it online, but nobody went because, frankly, I don\u2019t think they asked a game designer to help make it. If they had asked a game company to help build it, it would have worked. We could\u2019ve had 100,00 people be able to interact and engage with each other.<\/p>\n

There are already virtual concert companies now, and people are starting to see that games can really bring people together from the micro level of four people up to hundreds of thousands of players, even millions of players. We\u2019re learning from that and learning how to embrace that.<\/p>\n

But, going back to these smaller games, it\u2019s a reminder that a big hit can come from anywhere, and it\u2019s not just the EAs and Activisions of the world who can afford to build big games. A garage developer with two employees can build a game and as long as they did it right, if the game takes off, they can take off with it. It means the playing field is pretty level. That\u2019s exciting because big AAA games have huge budgets, which means they have to play it safe. They\u2019re not going to spend $200,000,000 on a game if they\u2019re worried it\u2019s not gonna sell. They have to have a franchise or a hook that will ensure it\u2019s going to sell…. What these smaller games show us is that you can afford to take risks, and many will fail, but if you hit it right you can have tens of millions of people playing your game overnight.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0The 10 Best Multiplayer Games of 2020<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

GR: To shift a bit, how do you see this future of creation and delivery of content through the cloud integrating with platforms like VR and mobile?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: …We have a number of “industry priority scenarios.” It doesn\u2019t roll of the tongue, but they\u2019re things that we think the industry really cares about today that may be pain points that we\u2019re trying to help with. The first one on our list of five is to accelerate game production with the cloud….<\/p>\n

This act of content creation, once you have it in the cloud, distribution becomes more fluid. We see this with Xcloud. It started out as just racking Xboxes in datacenters and streaming it. Now we\u2019re getting more experience with it, and you may be able to build game experiences that would not be possible without running in the cloud. Games were you can have lots of players in a single environment interacting in new ways…<\/p>\n

Xcloud was about putting Xboxes in the cloud *laugh* but the broader term is pixel streaming, where you\u2019re running GPUs in the cloud and streaming it down. Initially pixel streaming is going to be useful in non-gaming scenarios like architecture or retail where you want a 3D experience but you don\u2019t have to have the hardware. That will then move into gaming and you\u2019ll se developers leveraging experiences that go beyond what was possible before.<\/p>\n

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GR: Can you talk about where you see machine learning and AI going in game development? We\u2019ve seen things like DLSS, but is there more to it than that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: It\u2019s going to hit at every level of development. From the early stages of development to the deepest layers of gameplay. So just an example: on the content creation side we already talked about Flight Simulator<\/em>, but we also see machine learning models doing some pretty crazy stuff. We have a research project in our studios where they built a texture decompression and compression algorithm, where they trained a machine learning model up on textures. They can take a big texture, shrink it down till it\u2019s really ugly, and then use the machine learning model to decompress it again in real time. It\u2019s not exactly the same, but it looks really realistic. It\u2019s almost creepy how it works. There\u2019s a lot of areas where you can use AI as a creative aid.<\/p>\n

I just saw on VentureBeat the other day a new company using machine learning to help come up with game concepts. Literally, the machine spits out concept art and designs. It almost felt like an April Fools article, but I think it\u2019s legit. So you can see it from the early stage of creating concepts to creating art and assets.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re already doing some things at Microsoft in testing where we have AI bots in a testing loop\u00a0running through the game, or they can watch streams and look for texture errors and geometry errors…. We had a project recently where we built some personalization engines, or recommendation engines, that we built for retail. It\u2019s being used by Walmart to make consumer recommendations. We then tried to use the exact same tech in Minecraft<\/em>, for example, and it turns out it\u2019s way more effective. It does a pretty good job of making recommendations on the marketplace. So, we\u2019re going to try and roll that out and make it more available to developers. I love opportunities where we find something in another industry, and we can bring it over and apply it to gaming.<\/p>\n

Another example: we have voice-font technology where we can record and listen to a couple dozen hours of someone talking, and then build a model that can recreate that person\u2019s voice saying whatever we want them to say. When you think about that in the context of deep fakes it\u2019s deeply troubling, but when you think about its use in casting voices for games, it could allow an indie developer with a small budget to create thousands of hours of dialogue. Even better, have the computer speak using AI in whatever voice you want, you can get some really cool creative experiences. I love the idea of using voice fonts to let the computer speak in a more natural way than you typically get today. There\u2019s neat opportunities like that coming.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Nvidia Aims to Harness AI For Medical Imaging<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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GR: Something we\u2019ve seen from Microsoft is this very open approach,\u00a0with games subscriptions going across platforms. That\u2019s very different from the ‘walled garden’ approach you get from Sony and Nintendo. It seems like you\u2019ve talked a lot about that openness, the accessibility of assets and the accessibility of platforms to more developers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: One of the things I love about our team is we have a service called PlayFab party. It\u2019s our voice chat solution. And it\u2019s supported on a bunch of platforms including Switch, Playstation, even Stadia. We had to get special clearance from our lawyers, but we want to supply services that work across all these platforms. Every developer has the same goal which is to target gamers. They want to reach the broadest audience they can. Our Xbox team will compete with Playstation to try and get more gamers to buy our device, but at the same time when it comes to helping game developers, the goal is to help them reach gamers wherever they are.<\/p>\n

GR: So would you say that console exclusives are not the answer to moving platforms forward?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: The average game developer doesn\u2019t want exclusivity. The average game developer wants to be on every device that players are on. They want a mobile version, a console version. Console makers sometimes want exclusivity because they want their console to be special or better or whatever, but no, we don\u2019t think it\u2019s the answer<\/a>. We\u2019ve been pretty open about trying to support cross platform experiences.<\/p>\n

GR: We have so many more questions, but unfortunately it looks like we\u2019re running out of time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

JG: One thing that we didn\u2019t talk about that I would like to cover is that we\u2019re celebrating the 3-year anniversary of Microsoft acquiring PlayFab. I would like to close with how it\u2019s been an interesting journey. I came to Microsoft because of PlayFab, and they acquired PlayFab because Phil Spencer had this vision of building the world\u2019s best gaming platform. That\u2019s no longer just about silicon on the Xbox, it\u2019s increasingly about the cloud. We\u2019ve had a really good run and we\u2019ve grown almost 10X since we came to Microsoft. Now my role is shifting and I get the role of representing Microsoft more broadly across our entire cloud space. The fun job I have now is selling tools and services to developers of all sizes.<\/p>\n

[End.]<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0How Google Stadia Went from Cloud Gaming Giant to Wisp of Smoke<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

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