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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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