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Here’s an interesting titbit. Phil Harrison, VP of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, let slip that the future of the Xbox isn’t about one piece of hardware, but cloud-based gaming. Maybe the Xbox 720 won’t be all that revolutionary hardware-wise, then?
Apparently the Xbox will be more about a gaming brand across Microsoft’s plethora of devices, and not just about a gaming console. We’ve already seen a lot of that from the Xbox Live integration within both Windows Phone and Windows 8, and even stretching as far as Android and iOS.
“Increasingly, the games are going to sit on the cloud. Instead of being device centric, they will be cloud centric.”
“This vision is what influenced me to join Microsoft in the first place.”
That’s not to say the Xbox 720 won’t be mind-blowing, of course, but Microsoft’s gaming focus has certainly shifted. Like movies streamed on Netflix, it sounds like Microsoft’s working on gaming you can start on your phone, pick up on your tablet, and then finish off when you get home on your Xbox. To make that work, the nature of hard-core games will certainly have to change; it’s not like you’re going to be able to do that with Call of Duty now is it? Having said that, if you can make that happen, Microsoft, on a Windows Phone with thumbsticks and everything, I’m totally sold. [CVG]
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but isn’t that one of the reasons (apart from the price) that OnLive has never taken off in the UK?
we have shit internet here, why do this to us Microsoft?!
OnLive never really took off for two reasons; Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft control the market, and they really should have partnered with one of them if they wanted to make progress, and because the internet isn’t great everywhere. I think the first one had more to do with it, since the bandwidth required for OnLive isn’t much more than that required for multiplayer gaming right now.
That’s playing games on a cloud server, that’s not what’s being talked about here. Phil’s talking about syncing, more than playing directly off a server.
you said games sitting on the cloud. not game saves
He said, not me
And here I am, coming up with plans for the future with streaming, completely missing the point
. So basically, they want a Steam for consoles to be sorted by Microsoft.
I’m afraid I don’t really understand the article then, the article seems to say it’s going to be Xbox Onlive (with the mention it’s not going to be revolutionary hardware, also with the sentence “We’ve already seen a lot of that from the Xbox Live integration within both Windows Phone and Windows 8, and even stretching as far as Android and iOS.”), but what you’re saying in the comments is it’s going to be Xbox Steam
If it is going to be Xbox Steam, it’s going to need the hardware, just like Gaming Rigs do right now
i was meant to copy the whole paragraph in there
“Apparently the Xbox will be more about a gaming brand across Microsoft’s plethora of devices, and not just about a gaming console. We’ve already seen a lot of that from the Xbox Live integration within both Windows Phone and Windows 8, and even stretching as far as Android and iOS.”
I think this would be a good idea for Microsoft; release a small Intel Atom or ARM console running WindowsRT, 1Gb RAM, no graphics, wifi, 1 HDMI cable, 2 USB, nothing else, but have a dedicated XBox gaming app for streaming. They should make the box free, or something pathetic like a tenner, then everyone will own the latest XBox, and they can get away with charging £50 per game, making money in the long term. This should be the XBox 720.
Maybe in a couple of generations, when internet gets better.
you still need some gfx to render the stream
admittedly this could be onboard intel gfx rather than a decent GPU. and as you say, the CPU can be weak as hell.
How about a bigger OUYA style console with a newer processor e.g. Tegra 4 (Microsoft love their brand names)
And have a dedicated graphics card in it?
Smaller! Smaller than Ouya – I’m thinking smaller than Apple TV size. Why would you want dedicated graphics, unless you’re going to go Kepler, then it’ll be inferior to the PS3. What you’re doing would be a terrible route for Microsoft; you either go 1080p/4K locally with a massive fuck-off £500 XBox, or you go for a super cheap (ideally free) absolutely no graphics, stream it from servers. Why would you go for the middle ground? Then it ends up £100 and you don’t get either of the benefits…
Sorry, I meant integrated gfx, I kind of took it for granted that the Arm chip would be Tegra or Exymos (with gfx), and Atom have integrated gfx, I think. Caught me out there
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plenty of counties also have no or even worse than ours.
i cant see streaming HD games being a possibility for while globally.
i guess sony might offer backwards compatibility via streaming with gakai but i cant see it being any good for hardcore twitch games that require precise timing.
currently even playing online games suffers from rubber banding and latency and thats just small packets of data, not some 1080p at 60fps.
also, how will ISPs cope with everyone suddenly needing 20GB of bandwidth an hour?
If anyone can make the concept work, it’s Microsoft – Sony & Nintendo just don’t have the footprint outside of their consoles to put the games everywhere in the same way that MS do.
good idea or not.. if people dont trust the connection, service and their ISP (which as far as i can tell, no one trusts their ISP) this may just be a poor idea..
He could be talking about more “MMO” type games considering the direction Bungie have gone with “Destiny”.
Cloud gaming sucks because you cannot mod the games.
I’ll stick to PC gaming thanx where you have the control on your end.
The other issue with cloud is what about when you play offline, EG, i take my xbox to my old mans at xmas cos talking to my family is like grating your face, but he does not have any internet as he cant be arsed with it.. i know!! TBH i wont care too much as long as i can play games like GTA, Skyrim, Halo etc.. and they are as good or better looking than they are now.. i dont want to go backwards just cos it happens to be that there are now a million tablet gamers so “gamers” have to suffer etc..