The hazard of the Xbox cloud: EA cancels Titanfall in South Africa

Titanfall is online only, and that’s presenting some problems for the hotly anticipated sci-fi shooter.

On Tuesday, publisher Electronic Arts and developer Respawn Entertainment release the mech-filled action title Titanfall for Xbox One and PC (and March 25 for Xbox 360) … except not in South Africa. The game was originally going to come out in that country, but EA has changed its mind and is canceling preorders. The reason? Poor network performance during the mid-February beta test. Titanfall runs exclusively on the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure on all platforms, and Microsoft doesn’t have a close enough server cluster that can serve that part of the world with the kind of speed that a competitive online title requires. Those who made preorders are getting their money back.

EA South Africa posted the following statement to its Facebook page

After conducting recent online tests for Titanfall, we found that the performance rates in South Africa were not as high as we need to guarantee a great experience, so we have decided not to release Titanfall in South Africa at this time.

We understand this is a disappointment for local fans and will keep fans posted on any future plans regarding the release of Titanfall in South Africa.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft to see if it plans to add any extra servers to better serve South Africa, but it did not have a specific answer.

“We are always evaluating ways to bring the best gaming experiences to fans around the world, but we have nothing more to share at this time,” a Microsoft spokesperson told GamesBeat.

This doesn’t mean that online multiplayer games don’t work in South Africa. Titanfall is different because it doesn’t support dedicated servers or player-hosted online sessions. Other games, like Call of Duty: Ghosts for Xbox One, use a hybrid system. It runs on the Microsoft cloud when that is the best option, but it will switch to player-hosted sessions (which run the action on a local person’s console) when that will create the better experience. Most online console titles on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 only offered the player-hosted option.

PC is a different story. Most releases on that platform enable gamers to host sessions on their personal or rented servers. This enables them to get the best experience without having to rely on the developer. Respawn does not plan to offer that option.

We’ve reached out to EA to ask if would consider adding a hybrid or dedicated-server option, and we’ll update when we have more. But the fact that the publisher is canceling the game seems like evidence that it is sticking to the Microsoft cloud.

EA is probably not being stubborn (again, we’ve asked and are awaiting a response), instead Titanfall is simply built for something like Azure. The big issue is that Respawn’s shooter runs the artificial-intelligence routines for its computer-controlled grunts in the cloud, so that could present an engineering barrier that would prevent the hybrid or dedicated personal server models from working.

Back in June, Respawn’s chief cloud engineer Jon Shiring explained that Microsoft’s cloud technology will save the company a lot of money because Azure can scale servers on the fly.

“We don’t have to worry about estimating how many servers we’ll need on launch day,” he wrote in the blog. “We don’t have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don’t have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server.”

This is all stuff that Microsoft is handling, but obviously — in the case of South Africa — this solution isn’t entirely positive.

While South Africa won’t get the game at all, it’s not the only nation affected by Titanfall’s cloud. Australia also does not have a local Microsoft server cluster, which means that players in that nation are experiencing a relatively high latency on their connections. That puts them at a disadvantage, and it could hinder gameplay. EA must not feel like it ruins it because it is going forward with the release in that country.

For more on the Xbox cloud and what it is good and bad at, check our previous coverage.