Popular video game Minecraft which has over 126 million monthly users globally will stop using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and will shift its workloads to Azure Cloud from its parent company Microsoft.
According to a report in CNBC, the “shift represents an obvious way for Microsoft to cut back on payments to one of its toughest competitors and promote its own product”.
Azure is growing faster than many other Microsoft offerings. Most of its consumer and commercial properties, including the video conferencing app Teams, now run on Azure Cloud.
Microsoft would also “migrate LinkedIn from its own dedicated data centers to Azure,” according to the report on Monday.
Minecraft has topped 200 million sales, with 126 million people playing the game monthly. The game has seen a huge increase in use since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Over the last month, the game has seen an increase of 25 per cent in new players, with a 40 per cent rise in multiplayer sessions specifically.
When Microsoft acquired Mojang (the game developer behind Minecraft) for $2.5 billion in 2014, the game had sold more than 50 million copies across PC, Xbox 360, PS3, and other platforms.
The sandbox game hit the 100 million mark in 2016, meaning the growth of the game has actually increased in the last four years in comparison to the first five years after it launched in November 2011, according to the company.
Minecraft developer Mojang also announced a new name for the studio in celebration of the 11th anniversary of Minecraft. The new name for the developer is Mojang Studios.
“Mojang Studios has used AWS in the past, but we’ve been migrating all cloud services to Azure over the last few years,” a Microsoft spokesperson was quoted as saying in the report.
“We’ll be fully transitioned to Azure by the end of the year,” the spokesperson added.