Microsoft is Boosting Indie Game Development with Azure Cloud Tools

As the COVID pandemic has pushed many workers to remote work over the past year, offices are now beginning to open their doors to these employees, and returning to the office settings seems to be the norm once again.  However, Microsoft has dropped a massive arsenal of tools to help game studios remain remote and even released these tools for small indie studies to boost their workflow outside of the office.

ID@Azure is a collaboration of cloud-based initiatives to focus on team-based workflows without the need to be geographically next to each other.  This project might not appear to be much different than standard work from home tools, but game developers are faced with massive file-sharing problems and continuous version tracking needs that are simply not possible within other tools. 

Microsoft’s Azure platform is one of the industry’s most capable and powerful cloud systems and the new ID@Azure is focused on indie game studios and allowing them to compete with much larger studios without having to generate the overhead costs of a large office and internal servers to build their games as a team.

Beta testing has begun and seems to be reporting positive feedback, but many details of the system are still to be discovered and the scale at which it can operate is also an unknown.  It can be assumed that the system is aimed to help studios place their games onto Xbox and the Xbox Game Pass cloud service, but details have yet to be released.