Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp., attends the launch of Viva Tech and the technology meeting at the Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 24, 2018 in Paris, France.
Christophe Morin | IP3 | fake pictures
Microsoft will stop depending on Amazon to help it run the popular Minecraft video game.
The change represents an obvious way for Microsoft to cut payments to one of its toughest competitors and promote its own product. Amazon Web Services rules the public cloud infrastructure market to run software from afar across large data centers, and Microsoft has been working to share with its Azure cloud.
Azure is growing faster than many other parts of Microsoft, helping you lean less on older properties like Windows and Office. Moving more of its own software to Azure can help Microsoft expose customers that are looking nowhere else for computing, storage, and networking resources to offer their services online. That’s an important consideration, because Amazon can tell customers that its large e-commerce business consumes AWS resources.
Most of Microsoft’s business and consumer properties, including the Teams communication app, are already based on Azure. Last year, two and a half years after the acquisition of the corporate social network LinkedIn closed, Microsoft said it would migrate LinkedIn from its own dedicated Azure data centers.
The use of AWS for Minecraft for a version called Realms, virtual places for small groups to meet and play together in the open world, dates back to 2014. Months after AWS published a blog post about how Mojang, the developer of the game Behind Minecraft, having chosen to use AWS for Realms, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Mojang for $ 2.5 billion.
Minecraft has become the world’s best-selling game, with over 200 million copies sold as of May, and 126 million people play it each month.
“Mojang Studios has used AWS in the past, but we have been migrating all cloud services to Azure for the past several years,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email. Amazon declined to comment.
It wouldn’t have been correct to have Mojang downgraded from AWS immediately after the acquisition, Microsoft’s head of studies Matt Booty suggested in a recent interview.
“It would be easy for a large organization to go in and say, ‘Hey, let’s show you how it’s done. We’re going to get you out of this Java code. We’re going to move things to C. We’re going to get it out of Amazon Web Services and bring it to Azure.'” Booty told GamesIndustry.biz. “But it is important to realize that the conditions that Minecraft created, how it arose, are likely to be difficult things to recreate within a more corporate structure.”
Now there is an end in sight for a rival’s dependency.
“We will make the full transition to Azure by the end of the year,” wrote the Microsoft spokesperson.
CLOCK: How Unilever and Minecraft are putting education above profit
.
