So, MS has their cloud services that compete with Amazon etc. They want developers to make games utilizing the cloud, in order to enhance the gameplay experience. Fine. Sounds great.

They can either make the use of the cloud services free, or have a some kind of fee. It could be a nominal fee, just to prevent the need of spinning out servers that are hardly used at all, but most likely it will be a fee that's close to the market price of like services. The can either mandate the use of cloud, or leave it to the developers to figure out if any cloud based stuff would benefit their game. I hope the latter is the case.

Now, the funny thing is, MS is probably making PS4 games better with this. If there are any benefits to having a cloud based part of a software, then its probably beneficial regardless of the platform the software runs. Xbone has no special sauce and the basic computing is just basic computing on Xbone and on PS4. So, what happens when devs run their cloud stuff on MS's servers regardless on what platform the game is being played? Why couldn't PS4 multiplayer servers be hosted on MS's cloud? The only reason would be, that MS would deny publishers and devs this opportunity. How could they? I'm not that good with technical stuff, so I don't know. There's probably a way. If MS would deny access to the cloud for PS4 software, then why would any multiplatform developer or publisher take MS's offer? They would need to be much, much cheaper or much, much better than any of the competitors. Why wouldn't the publisher just go to Amazon and say: "Hey, this is the deal. MS is going to charge us X amount to use their servers, and we could only use them on Xbone. If you guys could make us an offer for Z amount of computing cycles and Y amount of space, which we could use regardless of platform and come close to what MS is offering, we have a deal."? Dealing with two vendors is more time consuming and therefore more expensive than dealing with just one. Even if Amazon (or whoever) couldn't match MS's offer per se, it would probably be wiser to go with them, rather than having to split the consumership between two vendors.