What's the big deal with Titanfall and Azure?
Respawn engineer Jon Shiring says that since the beta ended, some skeptical devs have already changed their minds about the feasibility of using Azure for the parts of a game traditionally handled by a user’s console or PC. In Titanfall’s case, that largely includes artificial-intelligence-powered teammates.
“Back when we started talking to Microsoft about it, everyone thought it was kind of crazy and a lot of other publishers were terrified of even doing it,” Shiring says. “I’ve heard that since our beta ended, they’ve been pounding down the doors at Microsoft because they’re realizing that it really is a real thing right now.”
What’s the big deal with this? The Titanfall game servers are all running on Azure, but it doesn’t seem to be anything special. If I installed Source Dedicated Server on an Azure Virtual Machine I could have Left 4 Dead’s “artificial-intelligence-powered teammates” running on Azure too.