And you know what that means? Local Australian servers for Xbox One games.
One of the major advantages Microsoft has been shouting about with regards to the Xbox One platform was it’s ability to send certain computational processes to the cloud. It’s a claim that some have ridiculed, but games like Forza in particular benefited.
Microsoft’s Azure Centres are largely for use with big business, but they’re also used to host games on the Xbox One platform. One of the main reasons Titanfall had poor online performance here in Australia (before EA and Respawn created their own local servers) was the fact that Australia’s Azure Servers weren’t open locally.
But next week that’s all set to change as Microsoft finally opens its Azure Centres in Sydney and Melbourne. Local partners have been testing the centres for the last month or so, but now they’re going public, meaning that future Xbox One games with online multiplayer — I’m looking at you Halo: Master Chief Collection — will be able to use local servers to host games.
This is a good thing.
Via Lifehacker
Comments
14 responses to “Microsoft’s Azure Centres Open In Australia Next Week, Local Servers Inbound”
Awwwww yeah.
Looks like someone just slapped those green dots on that image above without any knowledge wherre our cities are…
“Hmmm, where’s Sydney? That’s sorta the top half of Australia isn’t it?” *slap!*
“And Melbourne… That’s about… Here or something? Whatever” *slap!*
Was gonna say, looks more like they’re in Sydney and Townsville.
So I have a Chrome plugin that changes every word on the webpage that contains ‘cloud’ to ‘butt’. I read this forgetting that I had the plugin:
“One of the major advantages Microsoft has been shouting about with regards to the Xbox One platform was it’s ability to send certain computational processes to my butt.”
I took a double take.
But in relation to the article. Great news. Great timing too for Halo: MCC. It’s pretty much the Nirvana of all game releases for me so this is great news.
Aw heeeeeeeeellllll yeah.
This is a real game changer for Xbox one in Aus. Hopefully a decent competitive community will once again form around games like Halo. Hoping Forza 6 will use these dedicated servers for online races as well.
Is there any information on what these ‘Azure Centres’ are in Australia?
Are we talking actual data centres? Or just a couple of cabinets in CoLo somewhere?
the Azure Centre itself is the data centre. The Xbox Live servers located on site would be a small part of that.
Rumour has it that they have dedicated space with NextDC Sydney in Macquarie Park.
Keep in mind this isn’t a XBOX Live thing. It’s part of Microsoft’s bigger push to become a vital player in the future of cloud based services. They’ll be able to do this on a level that Sony and Nintendo will admit is well outside their reach because it’s consolidating Microsoft’s XBOX Live, professional and personal cloud services.
It’s actually quite an interesting position for them to be in. They’re able to justify a much larger investment because their uses are more diverse than their competition.
this great news yay
Most excellent indeed.
Good news 🙂
Does anyone know if these data centres will actually be utilised for legacy titles? (like Destiny and Forza Horizon 2…)
What does this mean for Brisbane? Will we be using Sydney/Melbourne servers?
Everyone in Au/NZ I would expect would connect to these servers. Pings would be much much better.
I’ve been waiting for these for ages 😀
But remember gamers – when you game becomes less popular (and over time it will), you’ll still end up playing other gamers from around the world – and our average ms to America is still 250ms on XBLive. We’ll still be yellow bar to their green, but simply (hopefully) not having a host player will even the playing field a bit more – and hopefully remove all types of playlist boosting through the prevention of lagswitching and host booting.
Does Azure’s presence in Australia mean that games like COD multiplayer for Xbox One will have less lag on XBL?
This is pretty big f**king assumption to make. They aren’t offering local email hosting for Exchange to Office 365 migrations but people are saying that there will be local Xbox Live servers? Who do you think gets preference? Business customers or gamers?
Until there is a press release from Microsoft confirming that the local Australian datacentres WILL be used to extend Xbox Live to Australia, you can only run with the assumption that this is NOT happening just yet.
Yes you can spin up Azure servers now from the Australian dc’s, but you would think that if it was being used for local Xbox Live servers also, that Microsoft would make a pretty big song and dance about that.