Unless you're pumped to play a MMO powered by Microsoft Azure, apparently "cloud" gaming isn't all that great, because the internet sucks.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-can-xbox-one-cloud-transform-gaming

I also wonder how much the Gaikai stuff will overlap feature-wise with Azure. Finally, I would love to see how games Mass Effect, AC, Fable or FF could take advantage of some of the hinted suggestions on expanding the NPC AI.

No one should have believed their claim in the first place. It's this generations lie of "hooking up your Cell-powered fridge and toaster will make your PS3 more powerful."

I could have told you that the minute the concept popped up.

Dependable local power is, duh, way better than streaming processes from a remote location. I can't see this being any more than a buzzword to sell consoles that developers might halfway use for the first few releases.

Nothing will overlap. People, please don't confuse receiving a video stream from a server (Gaikai, Onlive) with partially offloading processing tasks onto servers.

MS' "power of the cloud" talk is, of course, buzzword bullshit and I'm glad they got called out for it so shortly before E3. They're probably hastily rewriting their scripts right now. lol

@cptbedlam: Let me clarify: I meant to say I want to see how Sony is responding, if at all. I don't think backing the system up with additional servers is bad, and Sony has kept mum on its multiplayer strategy, where Azure is maybe going to help. Whether it's Gaikai or PSN v 2.0 is not really the point; they're all going to be Sony servers.

Man, I just want E3 to happen so we can stop speculating and start seeing. At this point I just wanna see what next-gen games will look like for the next year or two.

1. Here's Microsoft abusing the term 'Cloud' a couple of years ago:

2. Ever since we saw a kid SCAN IN HIS SKATEBOARD AND HAVE IT APPEAR IN THE GAME, followed by the Kinect coming out, maybe we should be taking these things with a Mr Fuji-esque handful of salt.

Do they have the new Xbox, no then its bullshit on both parts

Anyone who believed that insane cloud computing nonsense was... crazy.

Word. This just gives me flashbacks of Sony talking about the Cell.

Since this is Digital Foundry, frankly you cannot be sure about that. These guys tend to have the latest and most reliable scoop on these sorts of matters.

@evilnights said:

...What? I don't even understand. I mean usually I can at least see where they're coming from with buzzwords (like billions of transistors) but here I'm just left confused.

Yeah, sounds about right. That comment from him about Internet reliability is concerning though, and shows MS's general thoughts on this stuff. That Internet at this point is "as reliable as electricity" is ridiculous. I still have to be concerned about either slow connection speeds or just a straight drop on far from a comfortable basis. There's no way that I want my experience in a single player game to rely on that. It just makes them sound even more out of touch.

@angouri: Thanks for posting this, it was a really interesting read. I get that cloud computing provides somewhat limited possibilities at the moment. However assuming that these consoles will still be around after the year 2021 it's nice to know that Microsoft has at least tried to take into account the possibilities of cloud computing in the future. Right now I mostly see this stuff being used for AI like the story suggested. Maybe when you'r playing Crackdown 3 you can have four times the population in your game world when connected online than you would when playing offline etc.

I love reading Digital Foundry, and yeah, this isn't surprising. This was MS talking buzzword bullshit to obfuscate the fact that their system simply isn't as powerful as the Ps4, but still needed some sort of spiel to trick the kind of viewers who don't know what numbers mean into thinking it was.

What this cloud is actually about is MS expanding server parks with the goal of cutting p2p networking for games out, so that they can sell threads to publishers for dedicated game server hosting.

Why would they need an Xbox when their argument is about internet data rates and software architecture? They're offering a valid perspective on the state of distributed computing which holds true whether you apply it to consoles or any other device.

That would be a good thing for the multiplayer experience. Of course, it's unlikely that MS would have the stones to deny EA or Activision the ability to use their own servers instead so that seems like a plan which would backfire immediately, publishers still have to provide multiplayer on other platforms and aren't going to want to pay for MS servers and Sony servers and their own for PC.

Cloud power!