Microsoft is allegedly planning to make a significant change in its popular gaming world Minecraft. Reports have stated that the game developer, Mojang Studios, will be transferring its offerings onto the Microsoft Azure cloud system platform.
Previously, Minecraft, which boasts more than 125 million active players per month from all over the world, has been hosted on one of Azure’s biggest competitors, Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the company behind Mojang is now planning to bring it back within its own area of influence.
“Mojang Studios has used AWS in the past, but we’ve been migrating all cloud services to Azure over the last few years,” a Mojang spokesperson said in a statement. “We’ll be fully transitioned to Azure by the end of the year.”
Mojang was purchased by Microsoft in September 2014 for $2.5 billion, making an unbelievable rise to success for the game. Along with the core Minecraft product, Mojang released Minecraft Realms in 2014, giving players the chance to create private spaces, without having to set up and host games on a private server. Available for $8 a month, Minecraft Realms was completely hosted on AWS, but this will now transfer to Azure as well.
Minecraft on Microsoft Azure
The company says it has given Mojang time to get used to the idea of moving, rather than barging in after the purchase and making extensive changes.
“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,'” Matt Booty, the head of studios at Microsoft, told GamesIndustry.biz in a recent interview. “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.”
Microsoft Azure has been incredibly popular in recent years as demand for cloud computing capacity has increased over the last decade. The recent move towards remote working has also led to a rise in the usage of the platform, registering an about 27 percent year over year in Microsoft’s Q2 2020 records.
