Microsoft and PlayFab celebrate three years together, announce The PlayFab Anniversary Awards

This week, Microsoft and PlayFab are celebrating their third year together. In the years since the January 2018 partnership began, the community has grown to include not only developers but big-name studios and engineers, too. James Gwertzman, General Manager for Gaming Cloud (Azure, PlayFab, GitHub, etc) at Microsoft looked into the three-year partnership in a new blog post.

Editor’s note: Be sure to tune in to the OnPodcast this Sunday, as we’ll be sitting down with James for a one on one interview!

For those unfamiliar, Azure PlayFab lets developers and game designers Build and operate live games with a single platform. PlayFab gives access to game services, data analytics, and LiveOps tools to launch faster, extend a game’s lifecycle, and reduce costs. It also supports LiveOps services and multiplayer environments across platforms, including Xbox, PlayStation, Stadia, PC, and mobile. Games like Minecraft, as well as Roblox and Spongebob: Krusty Cook-Off are using Azure PlayFab.

According to Gwertzman, since PlayFab joined Microsoft, the number of individual titles using Azure PlayFab has skyrocketed by almost 9 times. Active users playing games that leverage Azure PlayFab services have grown by almost 9 times as well, and PlayFab’s scalable services supported more than 129,000 requests per second (RPS) in December 2020.

As an example, in Minecraft, Azure PlayFab is used to bolster its in-game marketplace and scale its evolving customer experiences. And, in Roblox, Azure PlayFab is used to deliver analytics as a service to top developers on the Roblox platform. In addition, Doom Eternal, Rainbow Six Siege, Sea of Thieves, Dirt 5, and No Man’s Sky all rely on Azure PlayFab for their global reach.

With all this popularity in mind, PlayFab is announcing the launch of the PlayFab Anniversary Awards, too. The awards will honor the amazing indie studios. You can check out the Azure PlayFab website here for more.

In addition, PlayFab is announcing that starting on January 29, they’ll make available their Party plugin for Unity for developers creating games for Nintendo Switch, Sony PlayStation 4 and 5, Android, and iOS. That is also in addition to the Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC platforms which are already supported. “This means developers can seamlessly and effortlessly integrate Party with their Unity title across platforms, attracting and connecting more players and driving more engagement with their games,” said James Gwertzman.