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Xbox One: Cloud Will Quadruple the Power, Says Microsoft
New submitter geirlk writes "Toms Hardware reports that 'Group program manager of Xbox Incubation & Prototyping Jeff Henshaw recently told OXM that for every console Microsoft builds, it will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud. This allows developers to assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game. Thus, developers can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players.'"
I know Nvidia has been experimenting with the idea and it has been mentioned here before many times.
I would not be surprised if MS teams up with them but from my impression it is not ready for prime time. Latency is bad and home ISPs suck. -eg my fiber FIOS is not capped at 200k a second! Need to pay $155 a month to unlock it back to where it was last year?!
With ISPs given a free ride to get rid of Net Neutrality they are deprioritize anything unless they double dip the consumers and site owners each way here in the US. Large textures with little latency being pipped back pre-rendered seems out of reach.
http://saveie6.com/
There are currently too many people playing your new game, and the servers can't handle it, so... yeah...
Isn't this just leading up the same chaos that is any Ubisoft game launch?
So we can assume that Xbox One games will be always-online and have server side processing ala Simcity 5... because that worked out so well for EA.
It is an always connected device, unless they have come up with a way for the cloud thing to work without an internet connection.
Of course this also means that if you lose your internet connection, then you have 1/4 the processing power to run your game.
I'm not too sure what they mean by this...
Talk is one thing, actually making it work (and actually be an improvement) is another thing.
Im still waiting for the jetpacks and hovercraft they promised us decades ago....
They might have 3 times the expected peak usage but NOT 3 times the power of every XboxS sold.
If this is the case, then that means the console does have to always be online.
Ugh, yeah sorry I guess I'm not the target market for the Xbox One, which is fine. I don't need to be. I have my PC and my Wii U.
Sounds amazing! I can't wait for all the articles about hammered servers on release and server maintenance.
I can't wait until MS decides that the servers running my favorite game aren't profitable anymore, so I am incapable of playing it anymore.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I read that as "more invasive for players". Which is probably true.
Cool, it'd be extremely difficult to use computing power offsite to do real-time calculations in parallel with local calculations. But it sure would be handy for crushing the used game market if we could lie say that we needed handle things server-side so you have to be online to play the game.
Also it would be cool to mine everything you do since it'd be easy to market. People will agree to all sorts of seemingly minor invasions of privacy for trivial gains, like free stuff, or especially if it was required to play the game. ...What am I saying. That would never happen.
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
They promise the cloud
But their promises are vapour
Xbone customer: duuuu herrr derp derp halo
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
So by "Power" they mean "Dependence on Mother Microsoft"
NOPE
the part i found interesting was:
"Those things often involve some complicated up-front calculations when you enter that world, but they don’t necessarily have to be updated every frame."
so i suppose technically, instead of your xbox pre-calculating a lot of this stuff, its offloaded. it could be done intelligently too - so increase the quality and if your offline and your xbox needs to do the calculations - then they're done at a lower priority with less precision?
the fact that its calculations which dont need updated each frame means latency shouldnt be as much of an issue. we aint streaming live game feeds here...
Cloud: Buzzword, meh.
+
Phone-home requirement: Disturbing.
+
Camera and mic that can't be disabled at all: Frightening.
=
I can't tell if this is 1984's telescreen or Max Headroom's rebus tape feed.
Either way I'm not letting one in my house.
Actually a good buddy of mine is one of the more derpy folks you could run into, plays nothing but assasins creed 3, madden, fifa, nhl games etc.
He won't be getting one of these new consoles because of the internet connection.
Shit, he doesn't have a landline or cable TV and the only reason he has an internet connection at all is basically netflix and downloading movies. If the XBox was a bit more open so you could use it as a general purpose entertainment center and print the odd PDF or something, connect, say, USB external drives to it etc, he'd probably never own anything else. Unfortunately its severely crippled when it could be a lot more.
This is in fact his new thing, when he needs something new. is that he's having me build him an HTPC that can run games etc and be upgraded as necessary. I'll hook an xbox controller up to it and he can play all the sports games he wants just as good as if it was an xbox anyways.
I think the major problem with consoles right now is that the companies making them are dealing with increasingly tech-savvy customers, even the derpy ones can handle an HTPC, and EVERYONE has that one techie friend they can just ask a few quick questions to now and then. The companies are stuck in the late 80s/early 90s mode of development though, where they're constantly trying to break things down into smaller chunks, make them simpler(which is still a good thing, within reason), and maybe then tack on restricted/broken added functionality.
When someone is looking at their phone and going "Well shit, I'm already paying the bill for this, it plays games which keep me entertained enough, and it does email/netflix/online banking/etc/etc" what the fuck are they going to buy your restricted-to-the-point-of-being-broken console for?
I think MS really missed the boat with Windows 8, they shouldn't have been targeting the tablet/phone market with it, they should have targeted the living room.
I think it depends on the company doing it. World of Warcraft likely does server side processing. Simcity was just a botched attempt to do what mmo do.
This, mod parent to infinity please.
I hate Xbox, Microsoft and everything about them as a company, but this idea isn't half bad if it is done right.
I remember reading them saying that if connectivity died, then new resources wouldn't be calculated from it.
And it would just be background stuff, like you mentioned, stuff that could look brilliant with the resources, or look pretty plain without.
It would be like installing/uninstalling an HD mod in realtime, pretty much, but only HD textures for, say, cloth textures, or whatever.
If they could integrate this in a way that wasn't that bad, and gave developers the right tools to be able to take advantage of this to the best that they possibly could do, without making it look awful, it could actually be brilliant.
We aren't speaking realtime raytracing here, but any extra number crunching could be put to good use, even if it is delayed by 500ms at worst times.
I'd say I was surprised, but since Microsoft are betting everything on the always online future, it was pretty natural to put effort in to something like this.
I almost wonder if Sony has anything like this planned considering they have that game streaming service they bought.
But considering they shoved 8gigs of GDDR5 memory in there, likely not. Who knows what they have planned with that craziness.
The most CPU intensive tasks in videogames are usually Rendering, Physics and AI. They work either in realtime or precomputed to some degree.
There is rarely a situation where you want to offload computation to something that takes a while (network latency), save for maybe pathfinding or geometry regeneration but is this more like a special case and has limited uses.
Can anyone really think of a general case optimization where this can be useful for most games?
When Xbox Tethered bombs.
Within 15 years? Aren't you optimistic!
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It would be like installing/uninstalling an HD mod in realtime, pretty much, but only HD textures for, say, cloth textures, or whatever.
If the textures are too big to fit on a bluray disc then they are too big to transfer across the internet for every play on any North American internet connection.
I read this same kind of analysis for the PS4. Does shifting more to the server side improve/decrease performance? Depends on your internet connection and network? An article I looked at emphasized the speed of the GDDR5 RAM Sony had used, how this indicated a shift towards network gaming. Is this part of the strategy of moving to a constant internet connection?
EA claimed that Simcity needed extra processing power to run. A guy hacked his game and it worked fine offline.
WTF would a company use a expensive server for 3x the processing power of a middle level PC just for a $60-80 game?
- Former Simcity fan and soon to be former Halo fanboy.
This won't work for any calculations in game that are latency sensitive. Someone push a button and the game needs to react? Cloud magic won't help, you need to deal with it locally.
It won't work for anything that's data-intensive, because they can't expect to send significant data back and forth reliably while people are already trying to play multiplayer on a lousy connection.
Since those are the two main things where a console with this level of local power might need help... what the hell are they supposed to be using all these servers for? Sounds like another Simcity debacle in the making.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
While I can't possibly see it as being legitimately profitable to Microsoft to provide 3x processing power in Azure for every X1 sold, I will at least say that Microsoft at least owns the datacenters and the software stacks for Azure as opposed to EA or Ubisoft. It's possible that MS will be better able to handle the processing and bandwidth for this reason.
I fear if they're going to start off assuming all of this extra power in the cloud, they might be unplayable within the first 15 days.
This just screams as something which is going to experience major problems on day 1, and will leave loads of people without a usable system.
I have no interest in having my games handled in the cloud, and I definitely won't be getting an XBox which wants access the network as it sees fit -- I tried that once, got ads in games for my trouble, and subsequently disconnected it from the network.
This whole console sounds like a non-starter to me and anybody else who doesn't want what Microsoft is envisioning. It's either capable of being a stand-alone box which isn't networked, or it isn't getting bought. And from the sounds of it, it's the latter.
But if Microsoft thinks I want their product to be my entertainment hub of the future, they're grossly mistaken.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why wouldn't they do that locally on one of the many CPUs that aren't required to show the game? Just what calculations are going to be so crazy intensive and yet have a dataset small enough where it's going to be faster to transmit it, calculate it there, send the results back, and load them?
There's almost no games that actually use four cores in a current PC, so what are they planning on doing that's going to require the equivalent of triple that while not generating (or requiring as input) a gigantic data set?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
if they are not sending video data like on live then you likely will not need high bandwidth and eat cap fast. Also lag / ping times will not need to be very low.
The big lag issues with on live is the control lag.
FPS and RTS games are ok with good lag times and don't need super low ones.
Sony and MS thinks everybody lives in a world where the connection is great, never drops and has awesome upload speeds. I live in Brazil and have fiber with 15mbps of Download and 1mbps of Upload. And I'm one of the few that have access to fiber. Most are still using ADSL, ISDN or Cable. Well, let's see what happens when two consoles with the same hardware launches in the same period.
and the PS4 will have faster system ram and better? cpu?
the PS4 will have sheared ram at video ram speeds. Xbox shared ram at only DDR3.
Can anybody explain to me what do they mean with "pre-compute" or not updating every frame? And how they would achieve that? Or rather, a case where they could use it?
The fog example is kind of okay, because you *don't* need to update the fog every frame (frame of what? Logic Frame? Render Frame? Network Frame?). But the pre-computing a scene makes no sense at all because by then you might aswell just pre-compute once and slap it on every media. Unless I'm missing something and that's not what they meant at all for pre-compute?
TL;DR: can anybody explain it to me as if I was 5 years old?
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Whats the point of getting a console anyways?? They are saying the consoles are so underpowered they need a boost from a network of servers?? I call Bullshit, What game is so power hungry it needs extra servers to run? None. This is a major waste of resources everything it takes to make electricity thats not necessary.
Jack of all trades,master of none
To maintain your household under constant marketing surveillance. I'm waiting for Bruce Schneier to weigh in on this one, specifically. He does an excellent examination of the general case in his recent "Surveillance and the Internet of Things"
Microsoft is taking Xbox further down the road of current trends in targeting and profiling "users". The model for most web applications and nearly all mobile apps has been that of of the Trojan Horse. An apparently benign, amusing or useful set of functions is presented the user, often below the cost of producing the technology. It does no good to labour the point with tedious argument: the applications are invasive and - depending on your perspective - abusive of privacy.
XBox One is the adaptation of these trends, delivered into the home as a 7/24 data collection head, with a colour camera and a microphone that can't be turned off.
"German federal commissioner for privacy protection: "Xbox One is a surveillance device"
Civil Liberties Australia says Xbox One 'meets definition of surveillance device'
Privacy breach: Xbox One a 'twisted nightmare'
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
When every console you sell costs you money, this seems like an extremely natural evolution. This is an excellent way for Microsoft to hemorage less money on consoles while having extra horse power than can be used for actual money-making purposes. This reduces risk.
Selling hardward below cost is becoming unsustainable. It has led to diversity in the game market dropping off. This writing has been on the wall for a while.
You have crappy, slow, or intermittent Internet, like 65%+ of the country does. Then I guess you're SOL and won't be able to play the $80 game you just bought, and won't be able to sell it either.
Yeah, this is going to work out sooo well. It simply amazes me that no one in a position of power at Microsoft can see how retarded this plan is.
As there are days of clouds there are also days of cloudless skies.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Because he has a ton of money and incredible broadband and loves to give middle fingers too!
The part I just can't see is what do I need "computed" on a server which will take longer to calculate locally? My biggest problem with the Internet is that it is the slowest part of all my computing needs. I don't buy this 3X faster crap! They can't even put 1X as fast per user equipment currently why does anybody expect that in the "FUTURE" that it will be any different?
This is just a bunch of marketing crap so they can get free press. When it comes out it will be as lame as the Wii U is today. Microsoft hasn't even explained how this will even hook up to my TV and offer better TV even though they spent hours boasting about its TV features. Does it connect to cable? HD? Satellite? Cablecard?
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
So, the game must run localy, if you use a network resource, you can't depend on it, and the game must adapt to losing it any time. Like programming a supercomputer! With the 10x workload that comes with it, and 100x the cost, because 99% of the developers simply can't write code like that.
Rethinking email
This isn't actually true though, since nobody is going to buy the Xbox One due its lack of any improvements whatsoever, game incompatibility, and used game policy from hell. Without anyone buying it, the cloud won't really do anything.
This just screams as something which is going to experience major problems on day 1, and will leave loads of people without a usable system.
If anyone complains about not being able to play the games they bought, that just means they're entitled brats who need to go get a life.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
They pretended the same with simcity, in fact as it turns out they are doign very very very absic calculation on the cloud, which could very well be done on your PC (because they don't take that much processing pwoer). Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it (price of processing power + broadband versus price of doing it on PC). No, the reality is that they want to have server side checks to enforce certain usage patern.
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and the PS4 will have faster system ram and better? cpu?
the PS4 will have sheared ram at video ram speeds. Xbox shared ram at only DDR3.
As Anand pointed out, the GDDR in the PS4 is actually a negative for the CPU side. GDDR has high latency to go along with its high bandwidth. That's fine for a GPU but bad for the CPU. This should put the Xbone on top for CPU performance, but luckily for Sony the PS4's GPU should have a 50% advantage in processing power on top of the benefit of the high bandwidth RAM and the GPU is usually a lot more important for game performance.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
In the surprisingly widespread reality in which people don't play on-line games and don't care about on-line content.
The current XBox can be ran just fine without a network connection, and just because you can't imagine a world in which people do that, it doesn't mean that a lot of us don't do it. Of the people I know who own XBoxes now, almost none of them use any on-line features or even have their XBox connected to the network, and they don't even have accounts on XBox Live.
Mine got disconnected from the network the first time I saw ads in both the home screen and in games last fall, and it will never be connected again.
So unless you happen to have very exact stats on what percentage of XBox owners don't use the on-line stuff, you're speaking out of your butt. Because I can tell you a lot of people right now don't connect them to the network -- right now, they don't need to unless they play on-line games. Microsoft is changing that and saying we will need to connect to the network if we want to use this box at all.
How do you envision that happening? You think MS and the publishers will lower prices for us because they're now charging for used games? No, they'll keep the prices high and look to pad out their bottom line. They're not going to lower prices, they'll keep 'em high and maximize profits.
A friend has had a few of my games for several months now -- and to date, it's been none of Microsoft's business. If they insist on changing that, they'll get sales from neither of us.
I will not be buying THIS game console, specifically because of this crap with the network.
Microsoft, obviously, won't give a shit that I'm not buying this. But they might discover that quite a few people have decided they don't want this set of features.
They want to become central to my entertainment experience -- but they can keep hoping. What you say people should just get over, I say I will not even consider buying this because it's stuff I don't want, and it lets Microsoft have more control over how I use game consoles now.
And, quite frankly, since it offers me nothing but losing some rights and putting up with more of their crap, they can keep the damned thing. Other than DRM, and the ability for them to collect my information and sell ads on my screen, there isn't a single reason why this is any better for me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Instead of having it on thecloud exclusively, why not use a local PC as a local cache and sync back to the cloud when needed? The downside is you need to make your system more robust, since people can obviously hack on the local PC data.
But if the data is really all prerendered stuff, then why not?
Simple:
If they don't have a local PC, then use the cloud.
If they have a local PC, then use that as the primary tier and sync back to the cloud.
If they need access to that data from another location, tunnel to the local PC if required.
You have to design around sync problems (what happens if the PC is off and the game starts, then the PC gets turned on, etc.). That's a pain to develop, but it'll also be better for the user.
Yes, the Cloud will quadruple Microsoft's power.
Power in their hands is power that's not in your hands.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is why Microsoft has been so vague about saying anything involving the used game market, or console-level DRM. What they are basically doing is setting up a system where publishers can build DRM right into the game under the guise of "extra processing power" so that when the backlash starts, Microsoft can sit back and tell everyone to take it up with the publishers.
Further taking away from the idea that games will be able to use extra processing power for actual gameplay and stuff, is that game developers always aim for the lowest common denominator when setting performance benchmarks. They aren't going to design a game that can take much advantage of cloud computing because they know full not everyone has high quality broadband with no bandwidth cap. Sure, you might see the occasional turn based strategy games or flight sims using it for real-world data or weather or something, but by and large it will be ignored for any significant features.
Microsoft knows it's about DRM, but doesn't want to take the bad press for saying so. Publishers know it's about DRM, and are willing to take the bad press for utilizing it as such.
"I think MS really missed the boat with Windows 8, they shouldn't have been targeting the tablet/phone market with it, they should have targeted the living room."
Beauty, man. The all-in-one remote and a full PC in a tablet as well. A perfect gift for the couch potato, to boot.
And as others have said about the new 'Box, when MS yanks the servers, as they did for their music thing, it's gonna be a mess. I think that while it can be seen as an interesting thing to try, it's ultimately a very stupid way to scrape some money out of people that you're eventually going to screw over.
[After deciding not to serve people without high-speed Internet connections,] the very same people that are left already have better devices to do the same thing such as gaming PCs [...] [The policy implemented on Xbox One will] make guys like me that sell and build affordable gaming PCs a LOT of money
People who rely on gaming PCs, such as the HTPCs you sell, end up running into problems where games are made available for a console but not for a gaming PC. Case in point: WB Games chose to make Mortal Kombat (2011) for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and one of the handhelds, but not PC.
Hell anybody with a PC less than 5 years old can pick up an HD4850 for like $40
My PC is less than five years old, but I don't know how to fit an HD4850 into it. It's a laptop. Besides, even if it were a desktop, a lot of people don't already own a sufficiently recent spare PC to dedicate to HTPC gaming use.
I have two connections from Lightspeed,.ca One is ADSL which gets 300gb per month and one is Cable which is unlimited.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I think you are being completely naive if you think games will actually, really, be improved by this, or that this will be used at all. Internet bandwidth sucks, and the only thing that could conceivably be aided by remote processing (IA) isn't really relevant hard enough to demand this kind of remote processing. It's not like the enemies in Call of Duty are super-smart, they are just scripted and shoot the player at a 70% chance to hit in a loop when idle.
There are two aspects to what Microsoft has been announcing:
1) They want people to accept that somehow always-on gaming is necessary, which we know isn't
2) They can discourage people to make direct hardware comparisons between the Xbox One, the PS4 and PCs.
And pretty much nothing else.
"three times the resources immediately available to their game."
How is network transported data "immediately available"? Here is my ping to Google.de:
--- google.de ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 58.939/73.092/86.936/11.524 ms
And that is if the other people in my apartment are not downloading anything. Even if you cut that in half, that is still 30ms ping, and that can be defined as "immediately available"? Compared to what, 0.000000001ms of ping to the CPU?
What are they drinking in the marketing department? Is it going like this: The press is bashing the hardware of the new Xbox. I know, we just add "the cloud" and make everyone shut up, the Playstation don't have "the cloud" so we are the greatest.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I'm not sure if you're kidding with the 2GB monthly cap, we're talking about cable and DSL connections here, not phones.
Some locations even in the United States have no cable or fiber provider and can't get a DSL signal. They have only satellite and microwave Internet available to them. (Microwave Internet, as I understand it, uses the same WiMAX technology as some "4G" cell phones but is provisioned differently because the subscriber's antenna is fixed.) Those used to have 5 GB per month caps; now I think they're up to 10 GB.
a large part of their target market is the working poor.
A lot of the working poor can't afford new game discs anyway, so they're not in the part of the market that the major video game publishers are targeting. Publishers would probably be content to "let them eat cake", figuring that $2.99 touch screen games on Google Play ought to be enough for them.
However, offloading any significant part of graphics processing isn't at all technically feasible.
OnLive? There's a reason that Sony bought Gaikai.
The "cloud" will not and cannot have any meaningful affect on real time gaming beyond multiplayer or artificially imposed restrictions on single player.
Or artificially imposed restrictions on multiplayer. Too many games don't allow split-screen play with two to four gamepads, which was the most common way that console multiplayer worked prior to the fourth quarter of 2005. Instead, they assume that multiplayer means online.
Get with the times pal, Mortal Kombat has been CONFIRMED to release on PC this summer.
That changes very little. First, summer was months ago in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. A quick check of Wikipedia confirms my suspicion: you meant "third quarter". Second, why the two-year lag? Third, Mortal Kombat (2011) is by far not the only affected game. If you want, I can find plenty more examples that are on both Xbox 360 and a PlayStation or Nintendo platform but have no PC version.
As opposed to the fourth quarter of 2001, when Microsoft released Windows "Close your eyes and stick out your tongue"?
Someone push a button and the game needs to react? Cloud magic won't help, you need to deal with it locally.
Yet multiplayer first-person shooters have by and large switched from split-screen and System Link (LAN play) to online play, despite someone pushing the fire button and the other consoles needing to react to the trajectory.
Inevitably the XBox1 will get rooted and I wonder how far that penetration will go into the cloud? Maybe to other accounts, other Xboxes? There could be a lot of interesting outcomes from letting MS foot the power bill for some bitcoin mining to bringing down the cloud with a DoS attack, to being able to 'peek' through the Kinect of another Xbox, etc.
I'll hook an xbox controller up to it and he can play all the sports games he wants just as good as if it was an xbox anyways.
That depends on whether the companies holding exclusive licenses for the major professional and collegiate sport leagues <cough>EA</cough> choose to continue to make a PC version.
the companies making them are dealing with increasingly tech-savvy customers, even the derpy ones can handle an HTPC
Other Slashdot users would appear to disagree with your claim. Especially CronoCloud. For a lot of people, connecting the family PC to a TV would require cutting a hole through the wall for an HDMI cable.
When someone is looking at their phone and going "Well shit, I'm already paying the bill for this, it plays games which keep me entertained enough, and it does email/netflix/online banking/etc/etc" what the fuck are they going to buy your restricted-to-the-point-of-being-broken console for?
For exclusive games that are made for consoles instead of phones because phones aren't guaranteed to have a gamepad, and a flat sheet of glass is highly suboptimal for several genres. Or for the kids who aren't legally old enough to have a job to pay for their own smartphone.
...Like a connectivity requirement only accessible to a minority fraction of your target demographic.
"for every console Microsoft builds, it will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud"
If they can do that, why don't they just make the actual console more powerful? I don't see how having 3/4 of your processing power located remotely is better than having it locally. And instead of the 500GB local storage that is frankly not that much by today's standards, they could have 2TB of local storage.
I think there's something they're not telling us.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This is a sensible business move for Microsoft - like Google's massive server farms, it's a capital investment that is a barriers for newcomers to breach. For MS/Google, it's a reasonably small percentage of xbox/LIVE revenue; but for a newcomer with small sales, it's prohibitively expensive.
But this only works if the server farm actually helps users... For google, the instant google-suggest is a pretty impressive and convenient feature - good enough for the barrier to be reasonably effective (though not absolutely compelling, IMHO). For Microsoft, the benefit is yet to be seen. Streaming video games would be helped but it, but that has had only modest success. That would help massive multiplayer games - but that's not MS's present market.
In other words: huge server farms for a game console is a great technology platform... all it needs is its "killer app".
cloudy
In the surprisingly widespread reality in which people don't play on-line games and don't care about on-line content.
The current XBox can be ran just fine without a network connection, and just because you can't imagine a world in which people do that, it doesn't mean that a lot of us don't do it.
This.
One of our favorite things is to get together at someone's house or the cabin and play XBox Trivial Pursuit with family and friends. While I appreciate the ability to connect in order to purchase and download additional question packs, if it required a network connection all the time just to play the game...well, I guess we'd just have to dust off the old board and even older question packs. Not even sure we'd be able to find all the wedge pieces anymore...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Once its explained to them, and they've seen it somewhere, most of them go for it
Which means we have to think of a way for the target market to have "seen it somewhere". I really want to encourage people to buy a gaming HTPC instead of a console, but retail stores aren't making it easy. A couple years ago, I asked in a Best Buy store about home theater PCs, and an associate directed me to the PlayStation 3 section. Given five $100 notes in one's hand, one is more likely to see a console in a store, try it, buy it, and load it into one's car than to buy a Visa gift card and then use that to buy a PC sight unseen through mail order.
And with Microsoft's push for gorilla arm in Windows 8, it's become a lot harder to find a suitable PC. I checked at Walmart, Best Buy, and Staples this week, and most PCs that I saw in stores were either laptops whose GPU isn't really made for gaming, iMac-style all-in-ones that would work in a bedroom but whose monitor isn't big enough for a living room environment, or full-size towers that wouldn't look good next to a television because they're loud and even more XBOX HUEG than the original Xbox. Ideally, something slim like an Acer X1 series would work, but I couldn't find anything like the Acer X1 that I had found a couple years ago at Walmart. So I guess people would buy a PC sight unseen through mail order. Provided that this is the case, which slim gaming HTPC under $400 should I recommend to people?
In addition, the limited capabilities of a console make it much easier for the manufacturer to get ease of use right. The console already comes with the receiver for its own wireless controllers. A PC receiver for Xbox 360 wireless controllers is available but not included. The entire user interface of a console can be navigated with a gamepad without having to go to the Internet and download some mouse simulator from some shady web site, and a console doesn't need the hassle of maintaining antivirus and the like.
Now though, everyone has an xbox or Wii and most of them just explain it as "Well, this is basically the same..."
Not exactly. One would run into multi-console games that aren't ported to the PC, such as most games that rely on shared-screen play with multiple controllers.
"except I can get youtube and a bunch of other stuff too!"
I don't see how YouTube is such a killer app for HTPCs. My cousin downloaded Google's official YouTube app from Wii Shop, and my other cousin has the YouTube app for Xbox 360.
Are you sure you've got the right definition of always-on? That sounds more like "on while you're using it".
How exactly do you make use of that power? You have huge latency over the net probably at the least a few screens worth. I can't see how playing a game with that lag factor built in would be pleasant. It will make game development crazy you have the local CPU to do quick calculations the remote one for something else probably stuff that can wait (long term strategy calculations?) and a whole buttload of async to handle (more than normal for games) since you've just added another potential 3-5 orders of magnitude lag between CPU/RAM and remote CPU/local system. Then there is the 3 orders from CPU to cache and you are looking at things from the 10^-9 to the ~10^-2 range crazy hard it would be like an annual planner that only has markers for planning by the minute that you have to coordinate.
No it was because they balanced the price and quality over the PS3 which was priced much highers. Also the fact that they had a more developer friendly system than the PS3 was a huge factor. The PS3 is still not likely seeing it's full potential and that was a mistake on Sony's part. So you sit a PS3 and an xbox 360 side by side and even when you don't downscale the PS3 gfx you still have something at least comparable for less of a price point up front. The 360 did offer through their live service for years a better community. Yes you had to pay but most seen it as worth it at the time. That's not the case anymore but it was when it was released and like I said for years after.
I think the thing about this launch that's really bad is that you're still paying for a good online service in an environment where the other two main competitors arn't and have comparable online services. The PS4 apparently has upped their game as far as developer friendliness which is huge, they have also made a huge improvement in hardware and exceeds the XBone. Essentially Nintendo decided to stay the course on their innovation, PS learned from their mistake and what put them behind the xbox in NA(A huge market not sure why you're knocking it). I'm not sure what Microsoft learned, but what they should have learned is, make a great CONSOLE then roll out new services and bring in other users. Get your fan base excited before you go out targeting new users. They had millions of people willing to be loyal now ready to jump ship. If they had done their game announcement before their hardware TV kinect announcement it would have went better I think. I don't think they are hooped but they better fucking show up for E3.
Numbers for consoles in 2010 http://www.shacknews.com/article/63785/worldwide-console-sales-numbers-revealed
Numbers for consoles in 2011 http://www.andrewfreedman.net/post/16987501105/xbox-360-tops-global-yearly-sales-2011
2012 numbers aren't a very good picture as people were anticipating the release of new consoles.
Can I run SETI@home or similar on those virtual consoles? If not, they're not "mine".
I had to take a second read at the article, "will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud". That means there's a lot of unused or underused hardware in the cloud while most of the consoles are in boxes at the stores, or are offline while people are asleep, or at work, or otherwise not gaming. I wonder if those enterprising people who build super computers out of gaming consoles will then demand their provision of processor time from Microsoft in order to quadruple their investment in hardware for no additional cost.
It's a quality of service thing
But when the market shifts due to all these terribad consoles will that remain the case?
Only if all three consoles are as "terribad" as some are making the Xbox One out to be. Wii U is just underpowered, not any stricter on users than Nintendo's previous consoles. Sony has already stated that PS4 won't block used games. And I've read rumors that both Sony and Nintendo plan to open up more to smaller developers in this generation, possibly as a response to iOS, Google Play, and Ouya. These might be just enough to keep fans of games in controller genres from defecting to Steam Big Picture or other PC offerings. And speaking of Steam, PC has been "terribad" about used games since the release of Half-Life 2 inaugurated Internet activation for single-player games.
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