According to a GDC listing, Microsoft is planning to expand the Xbox live support to cross platforms. The home video game console Xbox plays ones of the most popular games in the world, and Microsoft has decided to develop a Software Development Kit (SDK) that can be integrated to different platforms, like iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch beside Xbox and PC.
The company is planning to announce the news and the details about the new SDK in the upcoming 2019 Game Developers Conference (GDC). The Game Developers Conference is the yearly convention for the game developers where they showcase their ideas and new gaming products. This year the event will be held in San Francisco in March.
“Xbox Live is expanding from 400 million gaming devices and a reach to over 68 million active players to over 2 billion devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK,” says the GDC listing. At the event, Microsoft will be hosting a panel titled, “Xbox Live: Growing & Engaging Your Gaming Community Across Platforms.”
Microsoft has already made a few of its Xbox Live Achievements available on a few of the iOS and Android devices. But the new SDK will integrate Xbox Live achievements, friends, clubs and game history into non-Xbox and Windows PC platforms for the first time. The company will also be employing its PlayFab suite containing its backend tools as a part of this package.
“Xbox Live players are highly engaged and active on Xbox and PC, but now they can take their gaming achievement history, their friends list, their clubs, and more with them to almost every screen,” said Microsoft on its GDC conference schedule page.
This is an effort from Microsoft to break down longstanding barriers in the gaming industry, by building a cross-platform gaming service, that will enable the developers to get their users onto different platforms, such that they can be active on the Xbox games, without actually using the Xbox console.
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