Earn the trust of your players

Azure for game development helps you accelerate game development with Azure PlayFab managed services, build your own game services from scratch, or access developer tools and support with the ID@Azure programme for indie creators. Reach more players around the world with flexible DevOps tools for every platform and protect your players' data with enterprise-grade security. Azure for game development is built in partnership with Xbox Game Studios and cloud game developers worldwide.

Simplify Images
Bring your creative vision to life faster

Accelerate game production with Azure tools for version control and distributed builds. Collaborate seamlessly with your global team in the cloud or with your existing infrastructure using production pipelines for game creators and studios of all sizes.

Deliver low-latency, reliable gameplay

Bring your game title closer to your players and reduce latency for faster and more responsive gaming. Azure has more global datacentre regions (including China) than any other cloud provider. Automate your game server orchestration with Azure PlayFab Multiplayer Servers. Customise and control your own dedicated servers with Azure Virtual Machines. Manage containers with Azure Kubernetes Service for seamless scaling. Simplify your computing tasks with serverless technologies like Azure App Service.

Simplify Images
Simplify Images
Scale your game's multiplayer services

Bring players together with cross-platform PlayFab Party voice, chat, and translation faster than ever before. PlayFab multiplayer services offer simple yet powerful systems to help your players find each other, compete, communicate, and stay engaged. Grow fearlessly with a set of backend building blocks for your live game.

Understand and react to player behaviour

Gain real-time insights to understand, grow and retain your player base. Protect your players with enterprise-level security and GDPR and COPPA compliance. Collect, store and manage data from your games with Azure PlayFab data and analytics. Or for more customised control, build your own data layer with Azure managed databases.

Simplify Images
Simplify Images
Run your game as a service

Develop successful live games and keep players coming back with PlayFab LiveOps. Build and engage healthy communities by connecting player identities across platforms and enabling user-generated content. Make remote updates to your game store catalogue to extend the life of your game and manage your game economy for a better return on investment.

More benefits of Azure for game development

Keep your gamers playing

Safely scale your game experiences with more players and bigger worlds. Azure DDoS Protection mitigates an average of 1,955 attacks per day.

Increase game development productivity and efficiency

Move game production to the cloud, hire more distributed developers, and scale up your build farm by creating more virtual machines in just one click.

Deliver the games your players want

Use analytics, data, AI, and machine learning to understand your players and update game experiences to keep them coming back.

Build better games with best-in-class tools

Connect Perforce Helix Core, Incredibuild, and Unreal Pixel Streaming services, as well as Microsoft Visual Studio, Unreal Engine, Azure PlayFab, and more all in one cloud.

Handcraft every aspect of your game with Azure

Get detailed visual guides to integrating the back-end components for scaling and customizing game experiences and infrastructure.

oilImages
Basic Game Server Hosting on Azure

A step-by-step guide to setting up a basic Azure backend that will host a game server on either Windows or Linux, using a Minecraft server as an example.

oilImages
Synchronous Multiplayer Using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Make the move from infrastructure to platform as a service (PaaS). AKS is best for studios with development and DevOps resources looking for a solution that is optimized to fully orchestrate microservices.

oilImages
In-Editor Debugging Telemetry Reference Architecture

As you develop with Visual Studio, improve your game by piping gameplay data from a small sample of players into game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity.

oilImages
Synchronous Multiplayer Using Azure Service Fabric

Get the flexibility to host any variety of PaaS solutions or other container-based solutions without the need for a DevOps team. Let Azure manage hosting for you.

oilImages
Multiplayer Serverless Matchmaker

Learn how to deploy a Multiplayer serverless matchmaker.

oilImages
Non-relational Leaderboard Reference Architecture

Learn how to implement a leaderboard that uses Azure Cache for Redis in tandem with another database.

Related products

Azure PlayFab
Azure Game Development Virtual Machine
Azure Virtual Machines
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure DDoS Protection
Unreal Engine