Kyle Russell/Business Insider

Xbox One exclusive 'Titanfall' was built on Microsoft's Azure cloud.

In the battle to control tech in the living room, Microsoft's Xbox One is fighting on multiple fronts.

From the low end of the market, it's fighting against Apple, Amazon and Roku, which stream video content from the Internet to your TV through inexpensive set-stop boxes, starting at $99 — a far cry from the Xbox One's $449 price tag.

Then there's the PlayStation 4, Sony's flagship game console that offers similar gaming and video-streaming capabilities for $399.

Since most blockbuster games come to both the PS4 and the Xbox One, the key to a console's success this generation is differentiating the experience and offering exclusive games that you can't get anywhere else.

The most obvious way Microsoft made the Xbox One's user experience unique was the inclusion of the Kinect, which lets you control your console with voice and gestures alone. If you plug a cable box into the Xbox One, you can even use those same commands to control your television set as well.

Getting exclusive games is a bit trickier than introducing a new interface. While Microsoft Games Studios makes a number of successful game series for the Xbox platform, people don't just want "Halo." They want big, new games, too.

Developers and publishers of those games invest years and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to bring blockbuster games to the market. That means that they want to release their games to as many potential customers as they can — which is why most games now target the PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms.

To get exclusive games, Microsoft has either to pay publishers to brig their games only to the Xbox or to offer services for developers that you can't get anywhere else.

The original Xbox, for instance, was the best console for online gaming until the Xbox 360's release in 2005. With Xbox Live, it was the first console to make online gaming easily accessible. Neither Sony nor Nintendo offered anything comparable, so if you wanted your customers to have fun playing online, you built for Microsoft's console.

Sony pretty much caught up to Microsoft with its PlayStation Network on the PS3, so Microsoft had to come up with something new for the Xbox One. From today's keynote at the company's developer conference, Build, in San Francisco, it's clear that Microsoft thinks its Azure cloud can be that differentiator.

One of the first points brought up was that "Titanfall," the single biggest exclusive released for the Xbox One so far, is built on top of its cloud infrastructure.

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Kyle Russell/Business Insider

Hosting multiplayer video games on massive servers is nothing new. What is new is that Microsoft's infrastructure can massively scale up and down based on a developer's needs, all while doing far more complex operations than what was previously available.

Microsoft has invested far more into its cloud architecture than either Sony or Nintendo have for their platforms — after all, it's trying to compete with Amazon and Google in the space.

That means it can do more with its servers than anyone else, including advanced simulations that make graphics and in-game AI better. Last month, Respawn Entertainment, the company behind "Titanfall," co-founder Vince Campella told Business Insider that "all the AI and physics [in "Titanfall"] are done on the cloud."