According to a recent job listing that was listed by Microsoft Game Studios, the studio is looking for a software development engineer to work on a 300,000 player game in real-time.

“Microsoft Games Studios is looking for experienced game developers to work on next generation Xbox platform titles and Windows games for the first-party publishing team.

We want to enable millions of people to tune in and watch or play in groundbreaking new game experiences connected to LIVE … We are building the games, the console interface and logic, and the server support for all of this.

Both the games and the dashboard experience will be deeply paired with dynamic server support to create a compelling, fresh scenario each time.

We are building an extremely high performance system to extend console games to the server in new ways; creating a completely new set of web services to support dynamic programming information of games and scheduling data; integration with the Xbox LIVE services and Xbox.com infrastructure to deliver an end-to-end architecture with our partners.

The listing also mentions that the applicants will be involved in

“building a backend capable of hosting a 300,000 player game in real-time with real money on the line (anti-cheating, etc).”

Is this Microsoft’s answer to Sony’s MAG?