Microsoft's Playfab provides live services and infrastructure for games.
Microsoft's Playfab provides live services and infrastructure for games.
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Microsoft’s Game Stack chief: The next generation of games and game development

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 24 min

James Gwertzman started PlayFab to provide cloud-based tools and services for game developers, offloading the server infrastructure grunt work so developers could focus on games. In 2018, Microsoft bought PlayFab and integrated it into its Azure cloud services and renamed it Microsoft Game Stack. Now Gwertzman serves as general manager of Microsoft Game Stack, which continues to simplify cloud gaming services for developers.

In that position, Gwertzman gets a download on how thousands of games are developed and run efficiently on a variety of platforms. And he shared some of that knowledge in a recent press dinner in San Francisco.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.