SEGA And Microsoft Partner Up To Bring Next-Gen Games Via The Cloud

Was Sega the suppose to be the next big acquisition, and is this the end result? For some Sega is bigger then Bethesda.

Why cloud tho??

Next gen Sega channel has been in the works for a while so this isn't that crazy from said standpoint. However, if you told me in 2002 that eventually MS would work with Sony and Sega in the 2010's to the 2020's, I'd have laughed at you. I guess it just shows that more companies really are trying to make streaming a reality. With the power of investors, it seems they are forcing that to happen (and will likely succeed).

The future sure looks bright for us, someday. I mean FH5 and Halo Infinite will carry me for awhile but I'd love to just see a little of these AAAA, super games.

@Xiovanni Idk about that but I know MS helped Sega with DC. I didn't even know that until a decade on. That's why I specified if you'd told me that in 2002 I wouldn't have believed it.

Edit: That sounded a bit jerk-ish of me, so apologies if it came off that way, but upon Googling it I see you're right. I guess what goes around comes around. MS and Sega have been pretty open to collaboration if the opportunity makes sense, I guess.

it's all coming together 😀😀😀😀

This is just a way of improving working environment efficiency and Also sounds like sega are going to use the azure servers which means they are planning on making more "online/MMO" games or make their own streaming service like EA access or ubisoft plus

So don't get too excited for persona lol

Yup, xCloud already works great for me and I can see cloud gaming as the next big thing going forward. Hopefully this partnership means all/most Sega games come to Xbox in the future 🙂
@UltimateOtaku91
Persona is nice and all but I couldn't bring myself to finish it on PS5 (when I still had it). There are better games in Sega's portfolio I'd be more excited about.

Maybe those next gen cloud arcade games are going to come to Game Pass

I'm still annoyed at bill gates for not supporting Dreamcast games on the Xbox bk In the day , stupid decision to say no

But does this mean Sega will make good games again or not?

There has been a lot of talk about MS acquiring Sega but maybe that was people reading too much into the 'talks' that were probably taking place to form this partnership.

@The-Chosen-one The Cloud offers immense benefits to game developers. For a start, you are not limited on 'disc' storage for the 'design'. For example, a large open world map with all the assets can take up a lot of storage but you can have the whole 'Earth' on a Server in the cloud. 4k games with 4k quality assets take up even more storage so may limit games even more.

Its not just the limitations of internal storage on devices - especially with SSD prices, but if you also want to sell those games on a 'physical' disc, you are limited on storage for distribution. They could get round that by having a 'day 1 download' to install the game but you still have issues of local storage. The Cloud too can do a LOT of the heavy work too - AI, Physics etc could be down in the cloud too.

Another benefit to developers is that they could make a 'single' version of the game - not limited by the 'lowest' specs or trying to port to multiple devices. The game could run entirely in the cloud with all the visual bells & whistles, at a locked frame rate because its not limited by the spec of your hardware.

In the cloud, you could have worlds that are constantly evolving as it can be 'updated' every second. The whole world could feel much more alive with real time 'growth' and development throughout because the 'world' is running in the cloud.

There are MANY pro's to the cloud for developers/publishers and of course gamers. Of course some 'Cons' too but one of the major 'cons' seems to be addressed - Lag/latency. Whilst its still not quite the same as playing locally, its probably better than the 360 era. Also, if they target a minimum of 60fps, the input lag is 'significantly' lower than 30fps regardless.

In my opinion, the benefits of the cloud significantly outweigh the cons for devs/publishers and MS has the 'best' infrastructure for them. Its not just the cloud itself, but the distribution service (Game Pass) too. That service is on Last Gen too - you can play next gen games on XB1 by streaming from the cloud.

For a company like SEGA, they can make 'next' gen only games and reach billions. They don't need to worry about scaling down to run on an XB1s, just focus on one 'version' and that 1 version can reach millions of people regardless of their platform preference. They have seen the 'benefits' of Game Pass with their 'Yakuza' franchise of late too...

@gollumb82 true when sega gets brought up everyone instantly thinks of either sonic or persona, but I'd love a new valkyria chronicles instead

What makes me laugh is anytime something good happens with MS, the usual suspects come rolling in to downplay it as hard as possible, just like they did and do with Bethesda news

Do you think they Sega will bring Project Diva to XBOX finally with this deal?

@UltimateOtaku91
Agreed! I love Valkyria Chronicles.

Hopefully they call it the Sega Channel, because that is what I intend to call it.

@uptownsoul Time will tell. Try not to worry about it, mate. Everything will be okay

Does this mean guys that more Sega games will come to Xbox?

I'm hoping it's not a cloud game or streaming game, but a grand experience, that will use the cloud to update the world, as we play, or the computing power to raise the assets in a game. Kind of like how bmw made their hybrid engine, a 1.3L 3cylinder hybrid engine, pushes 369hp. Something like that. That doesnt rely on cloud for gaming, but more for performance.

@Ocat i feel a little bit (maybe i'm just hoping) that this is the beginning of Sega and Microsoft seeing how well they are able to work together. if this goes well and bears fruit, who knows?

Seems more like a behind doors business thing that has more to do with Sega building a cloud infrastructure and MMOs, which is a big category for them (remembering PSO2 is console exclusive on XB.) I doubt this has much to do with anything Xbox related for us, at least this generation. Could involve some exclusive title or so, probably an online/cloud/MMO thing, somewhere in the following gen. Also improves the relationship for Game Pass support, but Sega's already been pretty good with that, so I'm not sure there's any bribery needed.

@IronMan30 @Xiovanni Yes, MS helped Sega with Dreamcast (the machines have that shiny Windows CE sticker on the bottom....though....that's also how the DC was so easily hacked and pirated.....), and conversely after Sega pulled the DC, MS did bring them in to assist on the OG Xbox, so Xbox has always been the sort of rough continuation of Sega consoles.

@NEStalgia yeah, I have seen Xbox as more or less the modern day Sega consoles. Only backed by a much larger company, of course.

@uptownsoul Okay

Would prefer non-cloud versions of the classic SEGA games developed for the X-Box Series X, perhaps an Arcade Collection? This is great news!

@uptownsoul what can I say, you're an interesting guy.

In exvahnge for this I think more sega games will come to gamepass or maybe sega just used money as leverage, there's a chance persona will come to xbox but maybe only in the form of strikers, for all we know playstation might have a long term deal in place for mainline persona games and nintendo for shin megami games.

Also what do sony use the azure servers for in particular?

@UltimateOtaku91 I think it's to get more game pass games.

I hope.

But money makes sense hahaha

A lot of people are assuming this means cloud streaming or cloud-based services, but they didn't mention that in the article.

If anything, what I get from it is that post-pandemic, remote development is here to stay, and the challenges that developers have encountered is that of multiple people in multiple locations all working in sync. Builds have to be uploaded, shared, etc. before the next department can do their part. With a cloud based development environment, they could possibly work via the cloud and see the live results of everyone working on the project, similar to how it would be if they were all in the same office. I believe this is going to be 100% development, as opposed to hinting at what kind of end products we'll be playing on our consoles.

@SplooshDmg I just love that the whole Xbox team seems to consist of people that actually buy and play video games. Phil, Matt, Sarah, all of them have actually spent their money on video games in their lifetimes. Nintendo's Furukawa once played Golf Story..... Jim Ryan, can't even name the characters in the games he signs off on even when they're the top brand mascots. Shu Yoshida just gave up and bought a Steam Deck and a Series X. But they keep him locked in the basement with the indies they don't care about, after he previously ran the Studios. It's like sending Matt Booty to manage the Forza Horizon radio playlists full time.

@XxEvilAshxX If it were B2B productivity tools only, Sarah Bond and the Xbox team wouldn't really be involved in the announcement, that would all come from MS Enterprise Solutions/Azure team etc, same as the PSN on Azure announcements. There's definitely a consumer-facing piece to this if Xbox Studios is part of the announcement, even if it's that there's a closer partnership (Some sort of Sega version of EA Play that will be made that will be included in GP, etc.)

@IronMan30 With Blast Processing provided by Azure Cloud.

@Widey85 All but a few big, and a few ultra-niche JRPGs, in general, have been selling better worldwide than in Japan of late, anyway, so I'm not sure the Japanese user base is even the most important consideration for porting (unless you're Nintendo, but Nintendo has such a lock on Japan, and by and large Japanese Nintendo gamers buy only Japanese Nintendo games, which is why PS gets any support there at all, otherwise.) Japan's core console games market has really been shrinking other than Nintendo, PC has been growing somewhat, but the masses are all in on mobile gatcha.

Some of it is less about business strategy and more about "tradition." Square, Sega, etc, the big companies, support Xbox. Originally they didn't and there's accounts out there by former OG Xbox leaders about how they'd go to some party and the people at Square they'd been really getting along with and getting a good rapport with would be standing 2 inches away from some Sony execs that seemed to have them on a tether, and they'd pretend they had no idea who the MS people were like they'd never met them before and never talked with them. Back then, Sony had an iron grip over their Japanese partners. Not so much today. But Japan does tradition, and tradition is you support PS. And from that it also means dev teams mostly only have experience with PS. They're also usually smaller, lower budget A or AA studios and have limited funds and scale to add another platform they have little to no experience with. Falcom is a great example, they won't even touch Nintendo, they've always been Sony, their team only knows working with Sony, so they stick with Sony, but they're not against ports to other platforms, just so long as they don't have to do it themselves, thus NIS has been doing Switch ports for them recently. If Someone were to approach Falcom with a good price and tell them they want to port to Xbox, they'd probably greenlight it.

If MS really wanted to push hard on getting Japanese devs onboard to Xbox their focus should be on creating a "push button solution" to get PC games onto Xbox. Most Japanese devs, these days, are already PC devs. Even Falcom is doing PC now. If MS could find a push button solution to say "press this button, get your PC game on Xbox, and we'll automate all the barriers into our ecosystem for you" I think they could easily start getting nearly all J-games by default. Why ignore another market if you already are doing Windows and no more effort is required? They already have a relationship with these devs via Windows, even if the studios really work with Steam/Epic, they already have the MS dev tools, DX, etc going. And MS, seeing what they're doing platform-wide with BC enhancements, has the capability of using the platform to do something like simplifying a PC push. It may be taxing on system performance in involve some "emulation" of pieces of the core Windows tools that are different on console, maybe the games would run better on PS as a result, but I think they could pull it off.

Plus with big Japanese devs like Square and Sega really working close with MS it must certainly send the message to other smaller Japanese studios that working with Xbox isn't taboo or out of touch.

.....did Persona 5 happen to come up during these discussions?

@Xiovanni not exactly, Sega wanted to partner with them and make the Xbox backwards compatible with Dreamcast games. In the end Sega's next arcade machine the Chihiro was based upon the Xbox for games like Outrun 2.

As for the Dreamcast Microsoft's main involvement was having a version of Windows CE to run several games, though the operating system was only ever on the disc

@The-Chosen-one this is not about making cloud games, this is about virtualized development environment that allows dev teams to work remotely and all over the world.

This might sound at first like standard remote work environments but keep in mind multimedia heavy development can still be a huge challenge for remote teams.

At first, I thought cool, it's like the Sony deal, so no benefit for Xbox, but nice to see SEGA evolving.
But then I saw Sarah Bond is leading the talks for this and she stated on Twitter she looks forward to sharing more info in the future.
So now I'm thinking maybe this is more than sharing Azure tech and could involve some sort of EA Play style deal, where maybe SEGA games come to Game Pass later after release and start to form a library, maybe involving some revivals of older IP that are more suited to Game Pass rather than relying purely on game sales.

@BAMozzy
You actually have a good point there. 👍

Azure is the future. It the new Office monopoly.

To each their own, but for me...**** the cloud.