Google Steps on Microsoft’s Toes in New Cloud Gaming Push (Premium)

In what can only be seen as yet another attempt to attack Microsoft in yet another market, Google has unveiled a cloud-based gaming delivery service. It's called Agones.

And no, that's doesn't stand for "agony," though one must imagine that that's been the response out in Redmond this morning. Instead, Agones is Greek for "contest" or "gathering," as Google explains it. I assume they had to Google it too.

So what's the point of Agones, you ask? It's to do an end-run around Microsoft's video gaming future.

"Multiplayer games presents some unique challenges in the world of distributed systems, hosting and scaling dedicated game servers," Google says in its announcement of the service. "Today, we're excited to announce Agones, a new open-source project that uses Kubernetes to host and scale dedicated game servers."

The goal here is to provide game makers with a de facto standard for hosting multiplayer games. This is an alternative to today's system, where every publisher has to host these games themselves or work with third parties and whatever proprietary solutions they offer. It's also an alternative to the future of gaming, where only major cloud players like Microsoft---and now, Google too---will have the resources to deliver multiplayer games at scale.

Google is partnering on Agones with Ubisoft, the publisher most famous for its Assassins Creed titles.

"Agones helps by providing us with the flexibility to run dedicated game servers in optimal datacenters, and by giving our teams more control over the resources they need," Ubisoft's Carl Dionne says. "This collaboration makes it possible to combine Google Cloud’s expertise in deploying Kubernetes at scale with our deep knowledge of game development pipelines and technologies."

With Agones, game makers will be able to create, run, manage and scale dedicated game server processes and provision dedicated game servers more easily and much less expensively, Google says.

"Many of the popular fast-paced online multiplayer games such as competitive [first-person shooters, massively multiplayer online game, and multiplayer online battle arenas] require a dedicated game server, a full simulation of the game world, for players to connect to as they play within it. This dedicated game server is usually hosted somewhere on the internet to facilitate the state of the game between players, but also to be the arbiter of truth for each client playing the game, which also has the benefit of safeguarding against players cheating."

Agones is still in its early stages, but Google says it will rapidly add new features and, over time, support for Windows games, game server statistic collection and display, node autoscaling, and more.

And that's the rub, isn't it? I've seen a future where Microsoft is one of only a handful of companies that has the infrastructure to stream modern games at scale. And since Microsoft is the only cloud provider to have a stake in video gaming at a...

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