Microsoft, the company that makes the Xbox line of consoles, has announced intentions to bring Xbox Live and its new cross-platform development platform to Nintendo Switch.
If Microsoft succeeds in doing what it wants, Nintendo Switch users could soon access Xbox Live achievements, social features, and cross-platform play features. This will, of course, require Nintendo’s blessings first. PlayFab, a suite of backend tools, will also be leveraged as part of this package to help developers streamline making games for different platforms.
This information came from the GDC 2019 scheduling website, which you can take a look below:
“Xbox Live is one of the largest, most engaged gaming communities on the planet with decades of experience providing managed game services to developers that save you time and unlock all of the social and engagement features that players love.
Now Xbox Live is about to get MUCH bigger. Xbox Live is expanding from 400M gaming devices and a reach to over 68M active players to over 2B devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK.
Get a first look at the SDK to enable game developers to connect players between iOS, Android, and Switch in addition to Xbox and any game in the Microsoft Store on Windows PCs.
Takeaway
- Xbox Live players are highly engaged and active on Xbox and PC, but now they can take their gaming achievement history, their friends list, their clubs, and more with them to almost every screen.
- This will break down barriers for developers that want their communities to mingle more freely across platforms. Combined with PlayFab gaming services, this means less work for game developers and more time to focus on making games fun.”
What do you think?
