Titanfall dev explains why it's using Xbox Live Cloud

Respawn engineer Jon Shiring has posted a lengthy article explaining how Titanfall will benefit from using Microsoft's Xbox Live Cloud servers, contrasting the experiences found using player-hosted online games – featured in many console games today – versus expensive dedicated servers.

Speaking with both Microsoft and Sony to find an inexpensive way to have "potentially hundreds-of-thousands of dedicated servers," Respawn found a solution with Microsoft's Azure servers. "The Xbox group came back to us with a way for us to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers and that lets us push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, which lets us have a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that," he wrote.

"With the Xbox Live Cloud, we don't have to worry about estimating how many servers we'll need on launch day. We don't have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don't have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server," explained Shiring. "That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun. And best yet, Microsoft has datacenters all over the world, so everyone playing our game should have a consistent, low latency connection to their local datacenter."

Recent changes to Xbox One's digital rights management plans aside, the company is going ahead with a $700 million expansion of its Iowa data center, which will be used to support Xbox Live and other services.