Microsoft own a number of software and services among which is Minecraft one of the world most popular video game. The company in it’s attempt to bring everything under it’s control is hoping to stop relying on Amazon cloud services where the Minecraft system is being run through. In a nutshell, Microsoft will move Minecraft server away from Amazon to Azure.
The Windows developer is seeking to bring the video game platform back to it’s own cloud server Azure which will be an attempt to further boost it’s own stance in the cloud service industry as well as reduce it’s dependence on third-party companies not to mention the fact that Amazon is also a rival to Microsoft in some aspects especially as far as cloud service is concerned.
As the company moves more of it’s services and products to its own cloud server is significant about the steady growth of the Azure cloud service. Minecraft won’t be the only Microsoft service on Azure as others already exists such as the Teams communication application.
And do not forget a number of big time acquisitions the company made not very long ago which is the business social networking service Linkedin as well as the AI-Powered smartphone keyboard app SwiftKey, the company is definitely trying to take full ownership of it’s entire portfolio of businesses and acquisitions to bring them right under its own umbrella.
The use of AWS for Minecraft for a version called Realms — virtual places for small groups to gather and play the open-world game together — dates to 2014. Months after AWS published a blog post about how Mojang, the game developer behind Minecraft, had chosen to tap AWS for Realms, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Mojang for $2.5 billion.
And since then, Minecraft had risen to being the world’s best-selling game with more than 200 million copies sold as of May while more than 16 million people play the game each month. That in itself is a big achievement for the company.
“Mojang Studios has used AWS in the past, but we’ve been migrating all cloud services to Azure over the last few years,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email. Amazon declined to comment.
It would not have been right to make Mojang get off AWS immediately after the acquisition, Matt Booty, the head of studios at Microsoft, suggested in a recent interview.
“It would be easy for a large organization to come in and say: ‘Hey, we’re going to show you how it’s done. We’re going to get you off this Java code. We’re going to get things moved over to C. We’re going to get you off Amazon Web Services and over to Azure,’” Booty told GamesIndustry.biz. “But it’s important to realize that the conditions that created Minecraft, how it came to be, are likely to be things that are difficult to recreate within a more corporate structure.”
Now there is an end in sight for the dependence on a rival, Amazon but that is not a surprise as more companies move away from depending on rivals. We’ve seen Apple trying to create it’s own CPU for it’s future computers and many other companies trying to take full ownership of their entire business operations without the need to depend on others especially those they deem as their competitors.
“We’ll be fully transitioned to Azure by the end of the year,” the Microsoft spokesperson wrote.
