At this year's Game Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the creation of the Xbox Cloud Game Publishing Division, which will work with game studios to develop "cloud-native games" that will be exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem.
The head of the department is Kim Swift, who spent many years at Valve as a project lead and designer for Portal, and as a designer and artist for the Road to Survival series. Before joining Xbox last June, she served as director of game design at Stadia, Google's cloud gaming division.
Swift introduces the department's mission to work with world-class game development teams to develop cloud-native games. The main difference between cloud-native games and existing cloud games today is that cloud-native games will use cloud servers to handle operations on certain parts of the game, such as physics, lighting, environment, or AI.
An early example of this is the multiplayer "Destruction Zone" mode in Riot X-Men 3, which uses clouds to deal with the physics of destruction, and even if the player blows up the building into many pieces, it will not slow down the game's performance.
Riot Fighter 3 "Destruction Zone" mode
Swift also said cloud gaming is still in its infancy, but they're ready. She believes that the advantages of the future of cloud gaming are not only that players can play anytime, anywhere, and the use of cloud computing mentioned above to improve game operations, it will also use AI to enhance the game experience and assist game development.
On the one hand, cloud-native games can use AI to add smarter NPCs to the game; on the other hand, AI can also help game developers, such as training AI to test the game at scale, detect and deal with players' behavior of breaking the game, and improve the effect of random element generation.