[gordaco]

"There isn't enough silicon on the box", "We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box", "The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering".

So, will it need always online? In that case, here is a console I will never buy.

[xedarius]

Cloud doing any of these things is bonkers. The cloud is good at things like running Xbox live, making my profile available anywhere, saving my games. Using the internet, let me emphasis this, the transient, unreliable communication system that is the internet to deliver pivotal game deterministic results in nano seconds is unfeasible and unworkable.

[diydsp]

Hmmm... open up your mind a little bit...

Think of it this way: if the low-millisecond latency internet is good enough for multiplayer FPSs, i.e. exchange of player/missile coordinates, then why not use it for other aspects of game data too?

The article may have been a bit fuzzy in its discussion in general, but I believe it communicated clearly enough that gfx are on the GPU and longer latency stuff such as AI (which is _not_ computed in nanoseconds, nor does it need to be completely deterministic) can be done via external network interface.

Cloud AI has all kinds of other advantages, too, such as dynamically scaling difficulty, which we already see examples of in Starcraft 2...

[orf]

And you say this based on what? Have you done any research into this topic or are you just emphasising a point that you have no clue about?

[xedarius]

Without wishing to flame, it's based on 12 years of professional experience working in the games industry. I could lend reason to AI, however I stand by my comment with regards to rendering and physics.

[orf]

Not to put down your considerable experience but Microsoft is the largest software company on the planet - if anyone can do it then it would be them.

OnLive, despite failing, was not dissimilar to "cloud rendered graphics" and it worked. Lots of things people thought impossible 10 years ago are now commonplace.

[morsch]

So they're basically saying the same things that EA said for Sim City, and which, for Sim City, turned out to be a sack of lies (almost none of the game logic runs on EAs servers and it'd be entirely pointless if it did because SC requires a beefy machine anyway). OnLive, on the other hand, has been doing it properly for a while now, with some, but less than stellar success. Microsoft is in a much better position to deliver on the premise than either of these, but I remain unconvinced.

The basic question is, is it more efficient and overall cheaper to have #(max. concurrent clients) times the hardware running in a hosted (remote) environment than having #(all clients) times the hardware running locally. Clearly #(max. concurrent clients) is much lower than #(all clients). MS, as the owner of the platform is in a pretty good position of balancing between thin and thick client and forcing developers to work within this model, ie. making the client thin (read: cheap) enough that critical calculations need to be done on the server but thick enough to run some latency critical stuff and probably some of the rendering on the client.

[nwh]

It would be hilarious if true.

If my SimCity simulation needs more than a quad i7 to simulate, how many high-CPU instances is that? How many to handle every connected user? Even EA's current SimCity instances on EC2 can't handle basic save operations.

[siamore]

No, according to an interview with the president of Xbox Live only internet specific features like smartGlass will need a connection, some games that use such features may optionally require a connection[1]

[1] http://www.wpcentral.com/xbox-one-no-bc-not-always-online

[rbanffy]

The box is too big not to have decent processing inside it.