Sources close to Microsoft, as well as a recently pulled job listing, point to Microsoft wanting to go cross-platform with Xbox Live according to a report from The Verge.
People who own a Xbox One or Xbox 360—and the three of you out there who have a Windows Phone—understand how Xbox Live allows for multiplayer matchmaking, a cross-platform friends list, and, of course, all those precious Achievements. As it stands now, though, it’s a pain in the neck for developers to make games for the platform due to the lengthy and rigorous certification process Microsoft puts titles through.
As part of a movement to try to win back developers and make it easier to get more games on Xbox Live, Microsoft now apparently plans to build a platform to allow for Xbox Live functionality to extend to iOS and Android.
“We will create a modern framework that is open-source, lightweight, extensible and scalable across various platforms including Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, and Android,” a job listing for the project read before it was yanked from the interwebs.
Microsoft has already experimented with Achievements on these platforms before with Wordament, a word puzzler that came to iOS at the end of 2012 and hit Android just a few months later.
Expanding other Xbox Live services onto iOS and Android and dropping some of the shackles from the certification process could lure back some of the folks turned away by Microsoft’s old way of doing things. This holds especially true if the thought of importing already established friend lists and Achievements from consoles could draw in more gamers.