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Why Project Flare Might Just End the Console War

Posted by samzenpus on from the to-the-cloud dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Project Flare, the new server side gaming technology from Square Enix, turned heads when it was announced last week. The first tech demos do little more than show the vast number of calculations it can handle with hundreds of boxes tumbling down in Deus Ex, but the potential is there to do much more than just picture-in-picture feeds in MMOs. As a new article points out, what's most interesting is the potential to use the technology for games that use more than one system — OnLive may have used this tech before, but only to play games you can buy on discs in the shops anyway, but the future is in games that need the equivalent of dozens of PS4s or Xbox Ones to power them. Ubisoft has already partnered with Square on the project."

7 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. IMO, it is not going to work by faragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why to spend power in datacenters when people can use it at home? Other than vendor-lock, is non-sense. Another thing is how scalabe the thing is, etc.

    1. Re:IMO, it is not going to work by WaffleMonster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Its very simple - power savings, and cheaper thin consoles for end users.

      What power savings? Power is being consumed somewhere else where as a customer YOU are paying for that too. Lets not forget about additional power requirements required to push insane number of real-time bits for trivial reasons over the Internet.

      This would not work too well for multiplayer because of the latency between user-server-user, but would be great for single player.

      Since everyone would experience input latency and there is no network latency for the multi-player link latency would be about the same persistent problem whether it were single or multiplayer game. The only lag assuming lack of operator incompetence would be in the form of input delay with very limited opportunities to compensate with prediction algorithms. Nobody who plays on anything approaching a competitive basis would touch this thing.

    2. Re:IMO, it is not going to work by clockwise_music · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Works great till you realize the USA is currently worse than a third-world country in terms of broadband penetration and up/down speeds...

      Sorry, have you been to any third world countries? In many you're lucky if you can get dial-up speeds, yet alone a constant connection.

  2. Right... by Pinhedd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OnLive was such a bastion of success wasn't it?

  3. No thanks by epyT-R · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's a reason I've cut cable tv from my life. Being remote controlled and the only game in town, it's become overpriced, ad-laden, and content thin. If that's where gaming is going I will have to cut that too. The prospect of overpaying to 'stream' a laggy, ad-filled game experience with overly-constrained lossy-compressed AV doesn't sound inviting either. I LIKE the idea of having power under the hood locally, so to speak, just like I want server binaries for games to run my own servers and mod tools to make my own mods/maps. This way the game stays alive as long as there are interested players and doesn't die the moment it stops making money for its creators. To top it off, the current 'cloud' model for a lot of software now charges the 'owner-controlled boxed software' prices of the 90s for what amounts to a rent-a-go arcade level of service. What a rip-off.

    The more computing looks like ibm's wet dream of 'service', the less interesting and more oppressive it gets. No thanks.

  4. Obvious: latency by De+Lemming · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even with modern broadband, latency is still an issue for these kinds of applications. In the article are some examples of currently used server side gaming enhancements, like "Forza 5 will even use cloud computing to monitor the way you drive, and alter virtual drivers’ AI (artificial intelligence) accordingly." That has no need for low latency. But if you want the environment to immediately react to players actions, there need to be low latency. And you can't remove the distance (and related network infrastructure) between the player and the data center.

  5. Microsoft just debunked this for FPS games by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Some people kept saying "It's not that bad right now, it'll work eventually!", but Microsoft just (accidentally) tested OnLive's idea for low-latency games by introducing some small input lag into Windows 8.1. Guess what? FPS gamers noticed.

    Other game types which don't need super low latency, I'm sure, will eventually get here if only because game companies are still annoyingly DRM-focused and this will make piracy impossible.