We are pleased to announce the addition of Azure Resource Manager, Automation, Azure Batch, Log Analytics, Azure Media Services, Policy Administration Service/RBAC, Redis Cache, and Scheduler to certification scope in Microsoft Azure Government.
Each of these service offerings has received Joint Authorization Board (JAB) approval for addition to Azure Government’s P-ATO at the High Impact Level. With the addition of these eight offerings, the total number of Azure Government offerings that meet the FedRAMP High baseline grows to 26 services; 20 more services than AWS GovCloud.
These services may be used by Federal, DoD and state and local government customers and partners building solutions on Azure Government who are required to meet rigorous compliance standards such as FedRAMP High, DISA L4, CJIS, ITAR, and IRS 1075. The Azure Blueprint program is designed to facilitate the secure and compliant use of these and other Azure Government service offerings by providing solution accelerators and guidance concerning customer security responsibilities when architecting solutions in Azure.
About these services
Azure Resource Manager –Azure Resource Manager (ARM) enables you to repeatedly deploy your app and have confidence your resources are deployed in a consistent state. You define the infrastructure and dependencies for your app in a single declarative template. This template is flexible enough to use for all of your environments such as test, staging or production.
You put resources with a common lifecycle into a resource group that can be deployed or deleted in a single action. You can see which resources are linked by a dependency. You can apply tags to resources to categorize them for management tasks, such as billing as well as control who in the organization can perform actions on the resources by defining roles for users and groups. ARM logs all user actions so you can audit those actions.
Automation –Azure Automation uses Windows PowerShell scripts and workflows – known as runbooks – to handle the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of Azure resources and third-party applications. Automation runbooks work with Web Apps in Azure App Service, Azure Virtual Machines (Windows or Linux), Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and any service that offers public Internet APIs.
Azure Batch –Azure Batch makes it easy to run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in Azure. Use Batch to scale out parallel workloads, manage the execution of tasks in a queue, and cloud-enable applications to offload compute jobs to the cloud.
Log Analytics –Log Analytics is a service in Operations Management Suite that helps you collect and analyze data generated by resources in your cloud and on-premises environments. It gives you real-time insights using integrated search and custom dashboards to readily analyze millions of records across all of your workloads and servers regardless of their physical location.
Azure Media Services – Azure Media Services offers broadcast-quality video streaming services to reach larger audiences on today’s most popular mobile devices. With features that enhance accessibility, distribution, and scalability, Media Services makes it easy and cost-effective to stream and protect your content to audiences both local and worldwide.
Policy Administration Service/RBAC – Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables fine-grained access management for Azure. Using RBAC, you can grant only the amount of access that users need to perform their jobs.
Redis Cache – Based on the popular open source Redis cache—Redis Cache gives you access to a secure, dedicated cache for your Azure application usage. It leverages the low-latency, high-throughput capabilities of the Redis engine. This separate, distributed cache layer allows your data tier to scale independently for more efficient use of compute resources in your application layer.
Scheduler – Azure Scheduler lets you invoke actions that call HTTP/S endpoints or post messages to a storage queue on any schedule. You can use Scheduler to create jobs that reliably call services either inside or outside of Azure and run those jobs on demand, on a regular or irregular schedule, or at a future date.
Azure is dedicated to expanding the number of offerings available to government customers and will continue to provide updates through our blog as well as adding covered offerings to the Microsoft Trust Center.
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New Security Analytics Service: Finding and Fixing Risk in Office 365
Microsoft is pleased to announce the preview availability of a new security analytics service called the Office 365 Secure Score. The Secure Score is a security analytics tool that will help you understand what you have done to reduce the risk to your data in Office 365, and show you what you can do to further reduce that risk. We think of it as a credit score for security. Our approach to this experience was very simple. First, we created a full inventory of all the security configurations and behaviors that our customers can do to mitigate risks to their data in Office 365 (there are about 77 total things that we identified). Then, we evaluated the extent to which each of those controls mitigated a specific set of risks and awarded the control some points. More points means a more effective control for that risk. Lastly, we measure the extent to which your service has adopted the recommended controls, add up your points, and present it as a single score.
The core idea is that it is useful to rationalize and contextualize all of your cloud security configuration and behavioral options into one simple, analytical framework, and to make it very easy for you to take incremental action to improve your score over time. Rather than constructing a model with findings slotted into critical, moderate, or low severity, we wanted to give you a non-reactive way to evaluate your risk and make incremental changes over time that add up to a very effective risk mitigation plan.
The Office 365 Secure Score is a preview experience, so you may find issues, and you will note that not all of the controls are being measured. Please share any issues on the Office Network Group for Security. You can access the Secure Score at https://securescore.office.com.
The Secure Score does not express an absolute measure of how likely you are to get breached. It expresses the extent to which you have adopted controls which can offset the risk of being breached. No service can guarantee that you will not be breached, and the Secure Score should not be interpreted as a guarantee in any way.
Your Secure Score Summary
The first, most important piece of the Secure Score experience is the Score Summary. This panel gives you your current Secure Score, and the total number of points that are available to you, given your subscription level, the date that your score was measured, as well as a simple pie chart of your score. The denominator of your score is not intended to be a goal number to achieve. The full set of controls includes several that are very aggressive and will potentially have an adverse impact on your users’ productivity. Your goal should be to optimize your action to take every possible risk mitigating action while preserving your users’ productivity.
Risk Assessment
While the Secure Score is framed as a ‘gamification’ of your security, it is important to recognize that every action you take will mitigate a real world threat. This panel shows you the top threats for your tenancy, given your particular configuration and behaviors. Make sure you read about and understand the risks you are mitigating every time you take an action.
Compare Your Score
The Office 365 Average Secure Score is calculated from every Office 365 customer’s Secure Score. You can use this panel to get a better sense of how your score stacks up against the average. The specific controls that are passed by any given customer are not exposed in the average, and your Secure Score is private. Note that the Average Secure Score only includes the numerator of the score, not the denominator. So, the average points may be higher than you can achieve because there are points in controls associated with services that you have not purchased.
Take Action
Helping you figure out which actions to take to improve your score is the purpose of the Secure Score. There are three basic parts to the experience:
First, there is the modeler. Use the slider to figure out how many actions you want to review. Sliding to the left will reduce the number of actions in your list below, sliding to the right will increase the number. Each tick of the slider will add one control to the list. The target score shows you how much your score will increase if you take all the actions in the queue.
Second is the action pane. When you open this, you will see a description of the control, explaining why we think it is an effective mitigation, and what we observed about your configuration. We’ll also show you some details about the control such as the category (account, device, data), what the user impact of the action is (low or moderate) as well as your measured score. Clicking Learn More will open a fly-out pane that will walk you through taking the desired action.
Thirdly, you will see a remediation pane fly-out that explains exactly what you are about to change, and how it will affect your users. Eventually, the Launch Now link (which takes you to a separate security center now) will allow you to make the desired change right from the Secure Score experience.
Score Analyzer
Since the Secure Score experience is restricted to users that have been designated a Global Tenant Administrator, we wanted to make it easy for admins to analyze and report to their executives and stakeholders their progress on risk mitigation over time. The Score Analyzer experience allows you to review a line graph of your score over time, to export the audit of your control measurements for the selected day to either a PDF or a CSV, and to review what controls you have earned points for, and which ones you could take action on.
What’s Next
As mentioned, the Office 365 Secure Score is in a preview release. Over the coming months you will see us continue to add new controls, new measurements, and improvements to the remediation experiences. If you like what you see, please share with your network. If you see something we can improve, please share it with us on the Office Network Group for Security. We’re looking forward to seeing your scores go up, and making the Secure Score experience as useful, simple, and easy as it can be.
Microsoft Releases 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility Report
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
We care deeply about how we achieve that mission and our lasting impact on the world. Across the company, we are working to apply the power of technology to ensure corporate responsibility, safeguard human rights and protect our planet. This commitment is central to why many of our employees come to work every day, and it impacts the type of products and services we develop.
In our 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report, which we published today, you will find information about our policies and business practices which reflect our commitment to making the planet a better place.
During fiscal year 2016, Microsoft made progress on a number of fronts:
· Expanding our commitment to sustainability by establishing new energy goals, including having our data centers rely on a larger percentage of wind, solar and hydro power electricity over time.
· Prioritizing inclusive design and accessibility in the development of our products and services to empower everyone, while deepening our inclusive culture at Microsoft.
· Enhancing our companywide privacy principles and the Microsoft Privacy Statement to protect our customers’ personal data and their right to privacy.
· Holding our suppliers accountable to human rights, labor, health and safety, environmental, and business ethics practices prescribed in our Supplier Code of Conduct.
· Expanding economic opportunity to every corner of the planet through Microsoft Philanthropies’ three-year commitment to donate $1 billion in public cloud computing for nonprofits around the world.
· Contributing to public policy discussions with a new book, “A Cloud for Global Good,” which lays out a roadmap of 78 specific policy recommendations to help ensure cloud computing is trusted, responsible and inclusive.
As part of our commitment to transparency, this report builds on Microsoft’s prior annual citizenship reporting, but is now designed to be a living reporting website where we can offer both the year-over-year data we traditionally provide as well as ongoing updates throughout the year on important developments on our efforts.
We take seriously our responsibilities to help the world achieve more and are committed to meeting our responsibility to address economic, social and environmental issues. We also recognize the importance of partnerships and value the opportunity to work with nonprofits, advocates, governments, academics, customers and employees to advance progress. Together, we can strengthen communities and ensure greater outcomes for all.
We will continue to dedicate ourselves to the challenges humankind faces, the role technology can play and the unique contributions Microsoft can make in cooperation with others around the world.
4 Tech Topics That Are Better Than the Usual Thanksgiving Dinner Talk
By Kelly Cronin
Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday that fills our bellies, lets us relax, and of course reunites us with family. Over dinner you get to share stories and experiences with your loved ones, but sometimes you also have to hold your tongue during heated political debates and never-ending interrogations from your Aunt. If you want to avoid the usual "Are you seeing anyone yet?" questions, try starting an educational discussion on these sweet new technology-related topics (plus they'll finally make you seem smarter and more "with it" than your hot-shot cousin).
1) Microsoft Teams
Microsoft just released a new collaboration tool for business teams. The new chat-based workspace in Office 365 brings together people, conversations, content, and the tools teams need to achieve more together. Teams has a variety of features that users can take advantage of to keep on track with projects, meetings, and documents. You can add new "Teams" that let you create places to talk about anything you need to, a place to upload documents, and schedule a meeting with the team. These teams can also link with your Office 365 groups and will automatically include OneNote notebooks, tasks from Planner, and meetings scheduled in Outlook.
In a rush of new virtual reality gadgets, the Microsoft HoloLens has revolutionized the holographic experience by mixing virtual reality and augmented reality. You can show your family members some videos of the HoloLens that don't even seem real. Check out this demo of how the HoloLens could be used here.
The mixed reality experience is giving users the creative world to use the HoloLens for education, business, art, and of course just for fun. Western Reserve University uses the HoloLens to teach students anatomy.
Outlook on Office 365 recently added a Customer Manager feature. Outlook Customer Manager gives you a complete view of your interactions with each customer, helps you track tasks and deals in progress, and surfaces timely reminders. You can stay on top of customer relationships right from Outlook, with no need to install or learn separate tools. The information in the timeline is automatically gathered from the email, calendar and call log data from your Office 365 environment, minimizing the need to manually enter data about your customer interactions.
4) Systems Center Configuration Manager
With System Center Configuration Manager, you can now manage mobile devices using on-premises Configuration Manager infrastructure. All device management and management data is handled on-premises and is not part of Microsoft Intune or other cloud services. This type of device management doesn’t require client software since the capabilities that Configuration Manager uses to manage the devices are built into the device operating systems.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving meals, and try to keep your relatives talking about some neutral topics rather than openly saying who they voted for this year.
Happy Thanksgiving!
The public preview of SQL Server on Linux has arrived!
The public preview of the next major release of SQL Server brings the power of SQL Server to both Linux and Windows. SQL Server enables developers and organizations to build intelligent applications with industry-leading performance and security technologies using their preferred language and environment. With the next release of SQL Server, you can develop applications with SQL Server on Linux, Windows, Docker, or macOS (via Docker) and then deploy to Linux, Windows, or Docker, on-premises or in the cloud.
You’ll find native Linux installations made easy with familiar RPM and APT packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu Linux, and a package for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will be coming soon as well. Finally, the public preview for SQL Server is also available on Azure Virtual Machines on Windows and Linux and as images available on Docker Hub, offering a quick and easy installation within minutes.
Tooling on Linux
We have also released updated versions of our flagship SQL Server tools including SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Visual Studio SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server PowerShell with support for the next release of SQL Server on Windows and Linux. We are also excited to announce the new SQL Server extension for Visual Studio Code that is available now on the Visual Studio Code marketplace. Developers can use the SQL extension for VS Code on macOS/Linux/Windows with SQL Server running anywhere (on-premises, on Linux and Windows, in any cloud, in virtual machines, Docker) and with Azure SQL DB and Azure SQL DW. Native command-line tools are also available for SQL Server on Linux.
Get started today
Try the SQL Server on Linux Public Preview today! Get started with the public preview of the next release of SQL Server on Linux, macOS (via Docker) and Windows with our tutorials that show you how to install and use SQL Server on macOS, Docker, Windows, RHEL and Ubuntu and quickly build an app in a programming language of your choice.
If you’re still playing Pokemon Go, then you’ve likely invested enough time and energy to care about this DIY Pokemon Go helmet.
Before we go any further, this video is obviously for fun and isn’t available for sale — worth mentioning since I’m sure more than a few people actually got excited about this.
YouTuber (and self-proclaimed Queen of Shitty Robots) Simone Giertz created this video for some giggles, first spotted by the folks at Kotaku.
Hopefully this brings a giggle to your Monday routine.
And for what it’s worth, Giertz isn’t the only one still riding that Pokemon Go wave. Niantic, makers of the game, have seen more than $250 million in revenue since the game launched earlier this summer.
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Get in-depth with the future of game development at Microsoft
At GDC Europe 2016, the Microsoft developer platform team is excited to showcase the technologies we’ve been working on to make both game development and gaming better on Windows 10. Not only are we bringing games from our partners to play on the show floor, but we’ve also set up a hands-on area with workstations, where developers can engage 1:1 with Microsoft experts and get a free in-depth consultation on topics like Visual Studio, UWP, Unity, Azure gaming services, Windows Store, and Xbox. In the article below, we’re going into more depth into what gaming technologies are being rolled out as part of Windows 10 Anniversary Update this summer, and how Microsoft envisages the future of game development across Windows devices. You can also stay connected with us at future events or online on our game developer site.
Game development has come a long way since the first game of Tic-Tac-Toe appeared on a vacuum tube display in 1950. At Microsoft, we’ve been engaged in making game developers more productive for several decades, with the release of the Windows Games SDK in 1995 as only one example. Starting with the launch of Windows 10, and with the ongoing release cycle that moves away from monolithic OS releases, our vision for game devs has included constant integration of customer feedback to improve the developer experience. Moving forward, our developer platform and tools investments reflect this commitment. Combined with our broad vision of enabling developers to maximize their reach across devices with the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), we are building our vision future of game development on Windows devices – PCs, tablets, Xbox consoles, and HoloLens.
The way Microsoft is approaching the process of integrating customer feedback is by listening to developers’ needs and pain points, and constantly doing original research to come up with better ways to address them. This articles goes into depth on our key initiatives to make Windows game development better, what we’ve learned from that process over the years, and where our roadmap will lead us, starting with the release of Windows 10 Anniversary Update in August 2016. We are happy with the rapid embrace of Windows 10 by gamers, with over 45% of Steam users on Windows 10 as of July 2016, but understand that we need to remain responsive and engaged with this passionate audience.
When we were thinking about how to talk about our goals for game development tools on Windows 10, the conversation kept circling back to what we, many of us being software developers ourselves, expected from our dev environment. Together with asking game devs what they want, this has been our north star throughout: making sure game developers never having to ask themselves if Windows 10 is really the best possible dev box for creating PC games. This question informed how we’re thinking about building the over-arching goals we’ve set for ourselves: openness & community, power & capability, and finally engagement & reach.
Openness & Community
From the release of the new UWP technologies on Windows 10, our long-term vision has been to build a truly inclusive, open gaming ecosystem that spans device families and offers a great experience for all gamers, and an easy way to reach all of those customers for game developers.
In Windows Anniversary Update, a lot of the promise of openness is being realized. One concern that had previously been raised for the ease of selling and distributing UWP applications to users without using Windows Store, whether it’s a free download, or distributed through your own or a third-party online storefront. It’s clear that in prior Windows 10 releases, it wasn’t as intuitive to install UWP games obtained outside of Windows Store for many users. The end user had to either run a PowerShell script to install the certificate and install the game, or even type a command directly into PowerShell. Users were at times confused by certificate errors, or by the perception that sideloading games wasn’t the best way to install something. What we’re calling the “App Installer” is a pre-installed tool in Windows Anniversary Update that handles easy app installation: this enables a user to double-click any .appx or .appxbundle for straightforward installation, without the need for scripts or commands.
Just open Explorer and find your .appx or .appxbundle file, double-click, tell App Installer about your app, click Install, and that’s it. For advanced users, be aware that the game you’re installing needs to be trusted by your device, which safeguards against malware and other issues: this means that if you’re installing a developer or enterprise app with special rights/permissions, you need to have the signing certificate on the device you’re installing on. And unlike random .EXEs downloaded from the Internet, the App Installer specifically calls out what capabilities your game needs, such as accessing your Contacts.
We also keep openness in mind when building the Windows Store experiences on PC, which has traditionally been – and will remain – a rich, vibrant ecosystem, with competing and complementary platforms that allow developers to fully express their creativity, building and selling their games in any way they want. We are acutely aware that bringing games to market through Windows Store, for instance, needs to be a smooth, friction-free experience that gets out of the developers’ way whenever possible, but empowers them with tools and insights to improve their game experiences. Thinking about Store openness means having an easy onramp to sell your PC game in Windows Store: there’s no complicated account management process, requiring you to speak personally with someone at Microsoft to sell in Windows Store: simply create an account on Windows Dev Center, upload your content, and you’re ready to target the hundreds of millions of devices running Windows 10 today.
As Dev Center is evolving, we are adding new features and capabilities all the time, we roll them out first to the free Dev Center Insider Program. Recent dev-centric features added to the program were for instance targeted push notifications, allowing you to create custom notifications to send to specific groups of users only, for instance based on specific criteria you define, or bulk IAP management to avoid having to make submitting individual updates for each purchase.
As we roll out Windows Store to additional device families, we’re evolving the experience to where your games will be able to reach more gamers. With that in mind, we realize that many game developers have existing Windows games (Win32) that they’d like to bring to Windows Store. We are helping those developers with the Desktop Bridge, a set of technologies that game developers can use to convert, enhance and extend their games.
The bridge enables you to take your existing Windows game and convert it using the Desktop App Converter. After conversion, you will have a UWP app package (.appx or .appxbundle), which targets Windows 10. If you choose, you can then add UWP APIs to extend your game with Windows 10-specific functionality. To bring your existing game using the Desktop Bridge to Windows Store, please let us know.
Finally, we understand that games are often best played with others, and that game developers look for simple, powerful ways to plug into social gaming ecosystems to give their games staying power and build lasting communities. We are very proud of the success of Xbox LIVE, which has nearly fifty million monthly active users playing with and against each other, sharing gameplay videos, building clubs and making new friends. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to integrate LIVE into your games, including on Windows 10: the ID@Xbox program offers a simple sign-up process for getting access to the right Xbox APIs to reach those tens of millions of gamers.
Being part of ID@Xbox also gives game developers easy access to some of the most exciting gaming features we’re rolling out in 2016: Play Anywhere and Cross-Device Play. With Play Anywhere, participating game developers can make their game available on Windows 10 and Xbox One with the purchase of a single SKU, ensuring that your customer has your game playable on all of their gaming devices. Their progress is saved, and they can continue seamlessly from where they left off, including their game add-ons. Cross-Device play takes the promise of seamless gaming to another level: participating developers can enable play between different platforms, including Windows and Xbox One, in their games, reaching the widest audience of gamers and building the biggest possible community.
We are incredibly excited to see where game devs will take this, and what they’ll be building – IDARB, the first game to leverage the cross-device functionality is a great preview into what the future holds.
Power & Capability
The biggest reason why we talk about device families when we address game developers is because our goal is to build the best possible platform & APIs for each type of device, which in itself has multiple types – which make up the device family. A mobile experience, for instance, can come in different screen sizes and power levels, but shares commonalities around input method, rotation, and so on. Similarly, a desktop PC can have integrated graphics and limited RAM, for instance, but will usually have a mouse & keyboard connected. Consoles are often experiences at a ten-foot distance, with the resulting concerns around input mechanisms, UI display on screen, etc. Yet game developers will often want to target multiple device types without having to rewrite substantial chunks of code. The biggest challenge has been to accommodate device-specificity without requiring that ground-up rewrite, even when leveraging middleware and game engines that do a lot of heavy lifting.
This was the pain point we had in mind when building the Universal Windows Platform, enabling developers to write once and target multiple device families. Each device type needs code tailored to its unique capabilities. UWP provides that guarantee – both the core APIs that are available on every Windows device, and then unique APIs that are accessed conditionally depending on the device the code is run on. For game developers looking to target desktops, laptops, tablets, Xbox, and Windows Holographic, UWP will provide the seamless scalability requires on each device family.
Features are lit up by device type, presenting a differentiated, appropriate experience: if your UWP game is run on a tablet, for instance, it seamlessly adapts to touch controls and rotation, for instance. The same applies to UI and controls – UWP layout panels allow for tailoring across many screen sizes & resolutions.
The same applies to input handling – UWP games support universal controls that handle any input, such as mouse, keyboard, touch, pen, and controller (such as the Xbox controller). Scaling across displays and input modalities is only the beginning, however: UWP provides the building blocks for ensuring your game truly leverages the full capabilities of the multi-device family paradigm. Cloud services power your game no matter where the game’s users are, and game developers can build notifications to follow their user across Windows devices.
2016 is a big year for proving out the multi-device promise of UWP for game developers: the first huge block was the availability of Dev Mode for Xbox One, allowing any owner of a retail Xbox One console to start developing UWP games on their Xbox immediately. Coming soon, game-centric features from the Xbox Store will start appearing in the Windows Store, with the eventual combination of both stores into a single cohesive experience on Windows devices. Looking ahead, the announcement of Project Scorpio in 2016 also showed that developing for UWP is a straight path to deployment devices: creating UWP games today ensures compatibility with new Microsoft hardware initiatives.
Another peek at the future of game development on Windows was the introduction of DirectX12 on Windows 10. The best way to think about DirectX 12 is that it allows many gamers’ PC hardware to not just talk better to each other internally, squeezing out graphics performance out of existing GPUs and CPUs, but that it’s a technology that allows game developers to write closer to the metal than ever before. CPU and GPU performance is significantly increased, partially by reducing API overhead and by increasing overall efficiency.
Also in the graphics category, gamers and developers alike also asked us for broader support for core gaming features in UWP that they expect from classic Windows games. In May, Microsoft rolled out UWP support for AMD’s Freesync™ and NVIDIA’s G-SYNC™ in Universal Windows Platform games and apps, as well as unlocked frame rate support.
The last puzzle piece for capability is the support for Universal Windows Platform and Windows 10 in the most popular and powerful game development tools around, as well as their integration into the overall UWP ecosystem. Unity is a great example of a popular game engine integrating support for UWP, with easy creation of new UWP projects built into the interface. In turn support for new Unity projects is easily accessible from Visual Studio, with VS tools for Unity natively supported in Unity and both tools bundled in a single installer.
Similarly, recognizing of the popularity and power of Unreal Engine and game developer demand, Microsoft developed and released the source code of a UE4 fork with UWP support on GitHub in July, providing a clear development path to UWP for the most popular game development engines on Windows and game consoles.
Engagement & Reach
One of the biggest pain points we keep hearing from game developers isn’t necessarily around coding itself, but rather in how to reach an audience. The gaming market is getting crowded, with huge backlogs, tons of sales, and overflowing merchandising surfaces in online stores. Getting attention is getting harder all the time. Our goal is to ensure game developers have an end-to-end go-to-market pipeline that can maximize both the reach of their game, and engagement with potential customers. Unfortunately, this is often the least sexy part of making games, especially for indie devs, but crucial to driving developer success on a platform.
The first step is to make your game available in as many markets as possible; Windows Store is currently accessible in over 240 markets world-wide – knowing how to correctly engage with all of those potential customer is crucial. The advances promotional approaches available or coming soon to Windows Store are a result of listening to game devs’ long-running concern about how it’s sometimes very challenging to gain visibility, merchandising space or any kind of exposure when selling their game online.
Reach gamers directly inside Windows: UWP games can send notifications and Live Tile updates to segments of your users directly from Dev Center. This helps connect your users directly with new offers, features, updates and other news.
The promote your app feature is available in many markets, allowing developers to target regionally-relevant ads with localized content
New community ads are a mechanism to share unused ads-in-games space to promote each other at no cost
With Facebook Install Ads, devs can choose the type of user they want to reach, and deliver relevant ads directly to acquire & engage them. In addition, the Facebook Audience Network (SDK) allows devs to monetize through Facebook ads in Windows Store apps – more info coming later this year
Just as important as promotion and merchandising is your ability to understand what gamers are doing inside your game, and engaging with them in a way that deepens your game’s lifecycle and staying power. Some of the UWP development tools we offer are:
The new feedback API allows gamers to provide more targeted feedback/reviews about your game, giving you the ability to solicit feedback about a flight or version, prompt customers for their opinion on a specific feature or level, and more
Improved usage reports give you better insight into how customers are using your game
App Health reports that go deeper into what’s happening with your game, including crash event breakdowns, failure logs, debugging tools, and a lot more
Improved A/B testing for UWP games – by creating different experiences and rolling them out to different user segments, you can run experiments without modifying or republishing your game
Looking Ahead
So what does the future for game development on Windows devices look like? Above all, it’ll end up being even more about the gamer than today. The reason why the gaming market is rapidly getting crowded is because gamers are a passionate group of fans, and why many of us got into the gaming industry in the first place. For game developers, we think this means a couple of things:
First, attempts to limit game developers’ creativity or the desire of gamers to explore new types of games aren’t going to work, and shouldn’t be attempted. Success in this business means empowerment. The Windows gaming ecosystem can’t be locked down, and will defend itself against attempts to do so. For Microsoft, this means a commitment to preserving the open nature of the PC platform by making UWP as open as Win32 applications in terms of distribution, installation, and commerce.
Second, gamers want to play their content wherever they are, and where the game modality makes sense. If someone has both a console and a PC (or tablet with a connected controller), they usually don’t want to double-dip. But making a SKU available in multiple places will unquestionable deepen the gamer’s engagement with the product. We talked a lot about ‘scaling gracefully’ to the device the game finds itself on, and in the long run we will find that gamers are going to be expect their games just “be there,” a lot like what we’re seeing in music and video services.
Third, game development is undergoing massive changes right now to make it clear that it really is for everyone. Gamers have always come in all shapes and sizes, but not all of them have always felt that the culture was for them, even if they enjoyed gaming. This isn’t just about diversity in audience but also about inclusion in design. We’re incredibly aware of many gamers’ desire to have gaming become more accessible and welcoming.
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Microsoft acquires Beam interactive game live streaming service
Microsoft has acquired Beam, a Seattle-based interactive game streaming service that lets viewers play along with streamers as they watch. Beam’s model takes the mostly passive interaction that streaming fans may be used to from services like Twitch and YouTube, and adds the ability for viewers to interact with the streamer via crowdsourced controls.
Players interacting through Beam can direct the play of the person streaming, doing things like setting which weapon loadout they take into battle for multiplayer shooters, for example. It launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016, and won our Startup Battlefield competition. Visual controls provide viewers the ability to help players pick quests, and you can even assign challenges that alter the gameplay considerably from what you’d get via a typical play through.
Beam will join Microsoft’s Xbox team, and “remains committed to its mission of importing users and streamers across platforms” according to Microsoft.
Beam founder and CEO Matt Salsamendi told me via email that Xbox’s community focus is specifically what made them a good fit for the young company.
“I’m really excited about Xbox’s focus on community,” he wrote. “Beam is fundamentally built on a connected group of passionate individuals that love gaming, and Xbox is super in tune with that.”
In a blog post announcing the news, Salsamendi explained that no immediate changes are planned for the platform, but that the Microsoft acquisition will help Beam grow the platform and add new features and game integrations thanks to the addition support the larger company can provide.
“Right now it’s business as usual!” Salsamendi wrote regarding product plans. “We just launched three brand new interactive integrations and we’ll continue to focus on making the Beam platform an awesome place for gaming communities that want to interact with their audience.”
No terms of the deal were disclosed. The company launched on January 5 this year, with an official debut of its interactive tools at Disrupt in May. Salsamendi will lead the Beam team from Microsoft’s Redmond campus, where they’ll operate under the Xbox engineering department.
In addition to wining TechCrunch Disrupt, the Beam team had raised around $420,000 in seed funding, and participated in Techstars Seattle’s 2016 class.
For Microsoft, picking up Beam gives it a way to build an in-house streaming service, and one designed for participatory play. In its blog post announcing the deal, Microsoft highlights Minecraft as an example of how Beam’s software can promote more social play, and it’s actually a title tailor-made to the kinds of interactions Beam provides. If Microsoft can use the acquisition to drive more community engagement among the younger audience that devours Let’s Play videos, then this should turn out to be a very worthwhile partnership.
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Beam will join Microsoft’s Xbox team, and “remains committed to its mission of importing users and streamers across platforms” according to Microsoft.
