Case Study: IO Interactive achieves scalable, episodic Hitman live‑service delivery with Microsoft Azure

It’s a hit: Games studio slays expectations with new delivery model

IO Interactive, the Copenhagen studio behind the Hitman franchise, set out to reinvent the series as a continuously evolving, episodic game-as-a-service. The team’s challenge was that their existing server infrastructure couldn’t scale or adapt quickly enough to deliver frequent content updates, maintain stateful player sessions, and analyze live gameplay for millions of users worldwide.

IOI rebuilt its back end on Microsoft Azure PaaS—leveraging App Service, Cloud Services, SQL/Storage, the Orleans actor model (with plans for Service Fabric) and telemetry tools like Event Hubs, Stream Analytics and Data Factory—to enable elastic scaling, persistent sessions and real-time analytics. The platform supported six episodes rolled out over nine months, rapid live features such as elusive targets and escalation contracts, positive reviews, and a development workflow no longer constrained by infrastructure.

IO Interactive

Christian Corsano

Lead Online Programmer