[hga]

If the new CEO wants to change the culture for the better, Gates could be helpful, the Ballmer regime eliminated a lot of the failsafes Gates put into it.

Without a cultural change Microsoft should end its here to now futile attempts to expand outside of its core (has the Xbox, at net, ever made the a lot of money?), put Windows and Office in maintenance mode after restoring the utility of the former for normal desktops, and mostly become a stodgy enterprise software company.

[Encosia]

The Xbox as a foothold in the living room is huge.

[hga]

I'm not arguing against that. I'm asking have they been able to make serious money off of it, and while I'm at it, what's the potential for the future?

I assume the first generation wasn't wildly profitable due to the costs in establishing the ecosystem.

The second generation's hardware execution was infamously botched; we know they took a $900 million write-down on that debacle, and can be sure there were massive additional costs in e.g. brand equity.

How has it done since then?

[hershel]

Cloud gaming , chromecast and virtual reality(which better fits pc's due their power) will pose big challenges to the xbox .

[Encosia]

I have a Chromecast (plugged into the HDMI input on my Xbox One, actually). I don't see that being a credible threat to Xbox among consumers who can afford an Xbox. Possibly something used in tandem when there's not a native app (the Xbox apps for YouTube and Netflix are a much better experience than Chromecasting from a laptop or phone for me).

What do you mean by cloud gaming? Something like the Ouya or Steam's new device?

VR will be interesting. I'm not familiar enough with the hardware requirements to comment intelligently about that. I haven't done much with VR since the late 90s. Is the PS4/XB1's hardware not powerful enough to drive the kind of things that we're seeing the beginning of with Oculus Rift?

[hershel]

Regarding VR: Valve claims that pc's are a better fit to VR and they've done some serious research on VR. I'm taking it on face value(maybe i shouldn't ?).

Cloud gaming is when games are run on a server and streamed to your home. Combine chromecast and cloud gaming, and you suddenly got a huge platform, with much more users than xboox one/ps4. And since it's google ,it would probably run android games which there are tons. This could make the platform preferable for AAA gaming.

One more element that could be important in this is microsoft's "project spark" which let users build games with amazing creativity and amazing graphics. It's still in beta , but when it's release it could be a huge force in gaming , especially together with VR.

[Encosia]

I'd heard of this before, but never tried it myself. Out of curiosity, I just tried playing a game through OnLive, using my relatively high-end (for the US) business broadband connection.

I chose Witcher 2 since it was featured on the OnLive home page.

As the intro video streamed, I was impressed. It was smooth and the quality was good.

After the intro video, it all fell apart. The round trip latency on the menu screen was very jarring. Gameplay significantly magnified the latency issues. I felt like my character was drunk, trying to walk around even in the tutorial phase. I can't imagine how terrible that would be during demanding phases of the game. It really was terrible.

Maybe this would be useful for less demanding games, where latency isn't so crucial, but isn't that the whole point? A low powered device probably wouldn't need to outsource rendering in the first place if the game is slow enough that latency doesn't matter. Maybe I'm missing something.

Ironically, playing a few minutes on the OnLive trial made me interested in buying and downloading the real game via Steam, and made me never want to try anything on OnLive again.

[hershel]

For low latency, That's the sort of problem google likes to have: hard technical problems that require a lot of capital(building plenty of gaming clouds physically close to users).Maybe onlive just didn't had enough money so your cloud is far from you.

BTW: sony will be also offering it , so maybe the tech is ready ?

[Noxchi]

Cloud gaming is when a server renders your content for you, then streams the video to you. So you could play a very resource intensive game on e.g. a cheap tablet.

[hga]

In the US, at least, I see that severely limited by the small usage caps most of us with wired connections live under.

I expect it to follow whatever path Netflix et. al. blaze. Depending; Moore's Law is very much alive, but doesn't apply to batteries. What's the attraction of a cheap tablet vs. a not quite so cheap capable tablet now, or a cheap capable tablet tomorrow, and how much will this depend on battery capacity?