Microsoft Corp. is looking to capture a bigger slice of the $138 billion videogame industry with its Azure cloud platform.

The company today unveiled Game Stack, a suite of development tools specifically geared toward that market. The bundle combines services from Azure with other Microsoft products, including a heavily upgraded version of the PlayFab platform that the technology giant acquired last year.

PlayFab provides a set of cloud-based building blocks for developing online games. It includes tools for handling user account management and other essential tasks, as well as more specialized features such a leaderboard system that can keep track of player scores.

Microsoft has added five new services to PlayFab with the introduction of Game Stack, several of which use Azure. One is a tool called PlayFab Party that provides voice and chat features with automated translation powered by the cloud platform. Another service, Game Insights, uses the Azure Data Explorer analytics engine to help developers extract insights from data generated by players.

The three other new services address adjacent use cases. PlayFab can now support games that enable users to generate their own custom content, automatically organize multiplayer matches and handle content updates such as push notifications.

Microsoft’s vision is to connect PlayFab with its more general-purpose software development products into a cohesive, integrated toolkit under the Game Stack umbrella. That vision extends not just to the services on Azure but also to other offerings such as its Visual Studio code editor. The company has released a new plugin for the editor today that enables developers to directly access and update scripts hosted on PlayFab.

Game Stack’s one-stop-shop value proposition may help Microsoft gain an edge over rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc. in this segment. Over the past few years, AWS has built out an extensive collection of game development services, including a specialized hosting platform geared toward supporting online playing experiences.

Google LLC is also active in the videogame market. Last year, the search giant opened up Google Maps to developers working on titles in the style of Pokemon Go that require up-to-date geospatial data. The company is also working on a cloud-based game streaming service that will compete with the one Microsoft is developing atop Azure.

Photo: Michael Kappel/Flickr