Xbox One dedicated servers will be available for every game, free of charge

Written by Brandon Hofer on October 16, 2013

Xbox One News: Microsoft reveals they will offer free dedicated servers for every game to developers to entice them to put games on Xbox One.

Xbox One launches in a little over a month and Microsoft has just released an interesting tidbit of information. Recently on Twitter, a fan asked Senior Xbox director Albert Penello is dedicated servers would be included for all Xbox One games. Apparently the story is that not only will dedicated servers be available for all Xbox One games but that Microsoft will be providing these dedicated servers to developers, free of charge.

This information follows information that we already knew such as developers being able to offload certain aspects of a game to the cloud to all the hardware itself to concentrate on creating a good experience for the player.

Some of the potential advantages to this include:

Higher fidelity game experiences - Cloud compute can enable developers to offload computations for all sorts of environmental elements. In a typical game development scenario, the game creator needs to balance resource allocation across each area – world management, rendering, controls, networking, lighting, physics, AI, as well as networking and multiplayer. Balancing the local computing resources for all of these elements often results in developers making tradeoffs that result in more focus on core gameplay, and less on environments, NPC and other elements of world fidelity. However, when cloud compute is available to support the various computationally-intensive elements of the game, these kinds of tradeoffs become much easier for developers to make. Games can afford to provide higher fidelity worlds and deeply intelligent NPC AI all at the same time. These experiences could only be accomplished by leveraging the resources of servers.

Improved multiplayer game experiences - This is perhaps the most obvious example of what is possible with Xbox Live Compute – dedicated servers! If you have played a lot of multiplayer games, you know that playing on dedicated game servers has advantages over peer-to-peer gameplay. With server-based multiplayer gaming, not only can more players play the game (think hundreds of players simultaneously), the gameplay will be much more reliable for the players. No more host migration interruptions, suboptimal experiences for the host, home network NAT constraints, or player cheating! Additionally, Xbox Live Compute can be utilized to persist game state so that your squad can live to fight another day without losing any progress. A great example of a game that is using Xbox Live Compute for their dedicated server multiplayer experience is “Titanfall.”

Adaptive & evolving game play - Imagine the game you play every day improving each time you log in. Imagine joining a match in your favorite first person shooter to find new maps and game modes even though you never downloaded a game update. Imagine playing with your friend even when he/she is not online. When games are powered by Xbox Live Compute, they can be dynamically updated, tuned, changed, and improved continuously. Games will evolve and live on for greater periods of time, continually providing fresh content and new experiences. The flagship example of this application of cloud computing can be found with “Forza Motorsports 5, “and its Drivatar system.

With this new information now public about dedicated servers being available for free, it will certainly encourage developers of any size to try and put their games on Microsoft’s ecosystem so they can utilize all of the free (and paid for) features that Microsoft will be offering. What do you think about Microsoft offering free dedicated servers to developers for every Xbox One game?