Yesterday saw the kickoff for the AI and Gaming Summit, with Xbox’s very own Phil Spencer making an appearance. While it wasn’t focused on announcing new games or reveals, Spencer still had some interesting notes to say.
One of his biggest mentions was how developers could be using the cloud going forward to build their games natively, allowing creators to “scale the capabilities of their game up and down”. It also has the potential to host “hundreds or thousands in a game, or making use of multiple CPUs or GPUs, to deliver experiences no local hardware could unlock”.
The cloud’s potential has been teased before with games such as Crackdown 3, which was originally going to use it to enable an extensive amount of environmental damage within its world, which could not have been achieved on the Xbox One. Unfortunately it never made it to the game’s single player, and was strictly contained within its multiplayer mode, which Digital Foundry called “a simplification of the original demo”.
We also know Microsoft is heavily leaning into the cloud to deliver console experiences to a variety of devices, with more on the way, including PC. It’s been a successful process so far, so hopefully that’s a signal for what’s to come.
What do you think about Spencer’s comments towards the cloud? Let us know in the comment below.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 8
When we look back in the past, we see developers trying to squeeze their games to fit into the tiniest available memories by carefully shaving off every last few bytes through heavy optimisations. In a way, future developers will have an easier time dealing with game development.
I don't think he's wrong, but he's talking 10+ years into the future here.
For now, Cloud gaming will be a nice additional way to open up gaming to a wider audience without a substantial entry cost like consoles need.
While I don't really care much for cloud gaming, I do have to admit that technological advancements in gaming have stagnated and games are barely any different than they were 10 years ago. It's going to take something huge to make games vastly different from how they are today. Perhaps that something is the cloud, who knows.
I also believe that cloud techology will be big part of gaming in the future but that would be roughly 50 years from now since we need to wait until literally every corner on the earth have fast & reliable enough internet with good infrastructure to support truly comfortable cloud gaming experience that's indistinguishable from running the game natively on the hardware.
Clearly this is the future but how far I'm not sure. It's all about the access to fast and reliable internet, that's the bottleneck. No one wants to make another console if they can get away without it....it's a massive loss of money and time. It's the software and accessories that makes them cash.
Yup. MS future and focus looks trash. Stick with sony and nintendo and don't invest too much on xbox
On the whole streaming works quite well for many, it doesn't for others, but fundamentally the tech worked 10 years ago with OnLive.
But the one thing that can't keep up at the moment is internet speed and reliability related to ultra high resolutions.
It's fine for 1080p or even 1440p at a push but even then it is compressed and nowhere near as crisp as native. None of the services handle 4K despite purporting to.
Both the bandwidth, reliability plus needing to compress a 4K signal and send it almost instantly is all too much right now. Crucially unlike streaming video you don't have a buffer of the last x seconds to fall back on when you inevitably hit spikes.
I expect by the time this is solved we will be moving to 8K etc. and still have the same problem.
As such, and for other valid reasons, I think there will be a healthy appetite and market for consoles for a long time yet.
While I think SOME games will be developed cloud first, I'm not concerned this will be the norm any time even remotely soon.
@LiterallyDoNotCare I don't like the future Phil portends, but I believe it to be the future regardless. And that includes Playstation. Jimbo's not the type to sit on tradition as Kaz was. Look at his PC direction. He'll follow the big publisher trends, and if that means making Playstation a Disney+ platform in the cloud eventually, that's where he'll take it. It's not a one-brand issue. It's the entire gaming world. Nintendo targets the widest market possible, filled with every casual around. They'll make a platform to run within an app on mobile before PC cloud services, but they'll go there if that's where their market was. Imagine if the Nintendo DS was just an app & IAP storefront.....huge market, endless cash, very Nintendo. Not this year, but eventually.
@Senua Server hardware ain't cheap. They'll still have to squeeze every byte to optimize it at scale.
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