Xbox 720

[Frenetic Pony]

So here's the more interesting thing for all of you.

Both Microsoft and Sony seem very, very interested in cloud gaming. As in there's been rumors of Sony buying either Gaiki or OnLive (or at least looking) and Sony definitely expressing interest when asked for comment. Microsoft, if you look at that document, was interested in purchasing OnLive as early as 2010.

Of course OnLive hasn't exactly skyrocketed to a multibillion dollar business, and there's a lot of questions surrounding cloud gaming visa vis who pays for what and how. As in, if "YOU" only pay for the "game" then who pays for all the servers running your game? They aren't free you know.

Oh, and Microsoft was dreaming of console upgrades in that document as well. At the very least it looks like this new generation of consoles won't be as stayed and predictable as this past one has been.

[Henroid]

Even if OnLive isn't a huge moneymaker, how the hell would Sony afford to buy it out? There's no way.

[Murdoc]

My point was that if 512 MB has last the 360 until now why would 4GB be a big issue for a next gen console? If 4GB of RAM last the next xbox as long as 512 megabytes has lasted the 360 I don't see an issue.

Because it's actually an issue and one of the main bottlenecks I find in my job. Over the last 5 years we've stopped making a lot of 1024x512 textures and just make 512 which then get compressed to 256 or lower half the time. And it's not even a size issue, it's a variety issue as well.

In short, it's last this long not by choice and with out massive sacrifices and frustration to ship a game for at least the last couple years. To see your hard, good looking work, get crunched to shit near the end of the project is really disappointing.

By having a large amount of ram we prepare for the future and granted, it's just going to get eaten up by something, so why not compensate with a little more than what can be imagined now so it gives developers an some breathing room to try new things?

[Patters]

Even if OnLive isn't a huge moneymaker, how the hell would Sony afford to buy it out? There's no way.

Pretty much this. Sony have so little capital at the moment.

[Henroid]

Pretty much this. Sony have so little capital at the moment.

Well, some friends of mine who follow the industry news (business side) pointed out to me that Sony has 19 billion dollars in reserve. But what I'm more of getting at is earnings from latest pereformance from the last few years. Sony recently issued a demand to retail partners to no longer put 3D TVs up on discounted sale prices, just full retail now. And the PS3 was selling at a loss (even the PS2 sold at a loss for a while), and they've invested in Home, the PSP Go, which are each not the hottest things ever... So with the video game division not doing much performance wise and just now climbing up with the PS3, how would such a purchase even be considered?

Somewhat related, Sony shareholders recently put out their demand for the board of directors at Sony to change up, with Kaz Hirai heading it up.

Also to bring this back to MS, they have 54 billion in reserve apparently. So they could make this buy.

[berniesbc]

Having been an Onlive subscriber for a few months earlier this year I don't see how that technology could be ready to be folded into one of the consoles. It usually works quite well, but at least in the US, bandwidth caps are becoming more and more common. I'm a Comcast subscriber, and at the end of the month where I used Onlive most heavily I came within a few gigs of hitting my 250 gig cap. I certainly didn't download a bunch of huge files, and my normal video streaming wasn't any more heavy than normal, so that could only be attributed to Onlive. Point being, lots of cable internet subscribers would probably find themselves in some hot water with their ISPs when they spend 25 hours in a month playing cloud based games on their console.

Not to mention the fact that it just doesn't work all that well during peak hours.

[Henroid]

Bandwidth cap shenanigans are a major problem, and if it escalates any further to being heavy-handed, I would go as far as to say it's time for government intervention. At the moment, my only beef with it is mobile broadband caps being shockingly low (unlimited data plans were removed a couple years ago in favor of 5GB caps) (the math comes out to like 170 MBs of data use a day which is very easy to hit). Few companies on that front offer throttled speed vs. charging you for data beyond that. But it's my only internet solution out where I live that isn't dialup or satellite.

[toblix]

The fact that, in 2012, download caps are being added to internet connections, and not removed, is crazy to me. I get the impression it's becoming more and more common in North-America – why aren't people up in arms (or are they?), and why isn't some clever internet provider swooping in and clearing out the market with their uncapped connections?

[Gwardinen]

Well Henroid specifically mentioned mobile broadband caps, which are actually there for a reason. This video explains it better than I would.

As for main landline internet connections, I'm not sure if they're running into the same issues at all or if there are other reasons for the caps.

[Henroid]

Well Henroid specifically mentioned mobile broadband caps, which are actually there for a reason. This video explains it better than I would.

As for main landline internet connections, I'm not sure if they're running into the same issues at all or if there are other reasons for the caps.

I had missed some EC episodes lately and wow, that one was really important. And now I know. I am also powerless against it. So fml.

[toblix]

Oh, I didn't notice the "mobile" part. Yeah, those are definitely not hard to understand. My comment was based on my hearing about download caps on landline connections both in the US and Canada. Of course, this might just be the result of my not noticing "mobile" on many different occasions.

[Henroid]

Yeah don't get me wrong, landline caps are a totally different issue.

[Alunnite]

Would Steve Perlman's D.I.D.O technology sort out the bandwidth issues?

[berniesbc]

So Sony bought Gaikai today. I still think Cloud gaming is too impractical for most people for this to be a huge deal.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/what-sonys-gaikai-purchase-means-to-playstations-cloud-gaming-future/

[SiN]

Cloud gaming doesn't work well to be *the* way to play games, agreed. But for demos I'd be all over it.

[Gwardinen]

Cloud gaming doesn't work well to be *the* way to play games, agreed. But for demos I'd be all over it.

Yeah I've used OnLive's 30 minute trials of games more than once to quickly check if I'm interested. The demo that was up on the service of FTL a while back was also a great use of the system - it's a game that doesn't require particularly low latency and is graphically simple, so lag and video compression artifacts are both irrelevant. That said, graphically simple games aren't really what cloud gaming should be best for, since low end computers can probably run them anyway. The dream is that Battlefield 3-esque powerhouses could be run on cheap netbooks, and while OnLive and the like have shown they can allow you to play AAA games on that kind of hardware (or really, any hardware), those kinds of games tend to be ones that still benefit most from being rendered directly on the machine and having as little input latency as possible. So cloud gaming is in a weird place for me where what it is best at is what it is least useful for, as there aren't many computers out there that can't run Luxor (or FTL) directly.

[toblix]

If cloud gaming à la Onlive becomes a big thing, I wonder if publishers will start insisting on and API for playing their little vignettes each time you resume the game. Sometimes it seems like the most important thing for a publisher is to play five or six different videos before the main menu – will they give up all that without a fight?

[Frenetic Pony]

The oddest thing about these notions of cloud gaming is it's in direct competition with Moore's Law. If you've noticed, small(ish) laptops have gone from just starting out to actually being able to play some games in what, 3 years? And each successive year they'll just get better. Not to mention the stratospheric rise in "mobile" (phones and tablets) computational power, which looks to double yet again by next year, with predictions that the next Ipad, or SOME tablet at least, will equal or surpass the 360/PS3 in terms of graphical horsepower by the end of next year.

Meaning that, by the time cloud gaming is really practicable in say, 2015, it's questionable if there will be any real use case for it. Why would you, the consumer, pay both directly and indirectly for all that complex hardware and upkeep of infrastructure to play a game your new tablet can just run natively?

[SiN]

Two reasons:

1. the hardware would be *super* cheap. Think $50 console around the size of an AppleTV. That said, I'd imagine an annual subscription would be mandatory to play the console at all.

2. Cloud computers wouldn't be limited by Moore's Law. They wouldn't have to worry about heat/size issues in the conventional fit-it-in-a-tiny-box sense. Hardware costs would be significantly lower, since computers would be 1-to-many-users.

[Frenetic Pony]

Two reasons:

1. the hardware would be *super* cheap. Think $50 console around the size of an AppleTV. That said, I'd imagine an annual subscription would be mandatory to play the console at all.

2. Cloud computers wouldn't be limited by Moore's Law. They wouldn't have to worry about heat/size issues in the conventional fit-it-in-a-tiny-box sense. Hardware costs would be significantly lower, since computers would be 1-to-many-users.

Here's the thing, Cloud computers are as limited by Moore's law as anything else, and that's because the hardware ISN'T cheap. What most people who've heard of this fail to think about it is that YOU still pay for all the hardware. Is that servers cost money, the people setting up those and maintaining those servers cost money, bandwidth costs money, the IT costs of huge and massively complex cloud infrastructure costs money. You are still going to be paying for the computer you are using, it still needs to exist somewhere.

Except this time you don't get to keep any of the hardware you're paying for. In fact, if the service somehow goes offline you don't get the games either. "Cloud gaming" could end up costing MORE than client side gaming.

[Chris]

Here's the thing, Cloud computers are as limited by Moore's law as anything else, and that's because the hardware ISN'T cheap. What most people who've heard of this fail to think about it is that YOU still pay for all the hardware. Is that servers cost money, the people setting up those and maintaining those servers cost money, bandwidth costs money, the IT costs of huge and massively complex cloud infrastructure costs money. You are still going to be paying for the computer you are using, it still needs to exist somewhere.

Except this time you don't get to keep any of the hardware you're paying for. In fact, if the service somehow goes offline you don't get the games either. "Cloud gaming" could end up costing MORE than client side gaming.

Cost to the consumer is one thing because that's affected by a lot of other factors, but purely on the service provider side, the hardware is still a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be because they don't need a discrete machine for each user. The company is also buying in volume. Similarly, colocation is cheaper than running a server yourself.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Meaning that, by the time cloud gaming is really practicable in say, 2015, it's questionable if there will be any real use case for it. Why would you, the consumer, pay both directly and indirectly for all that complex hardware and upkeep of infrastructure to play a game your new tablet can just run natively?

Surely graphics quality and system requirements will increase, as they always have, as more capable hardware is created? Wouldn't that mean there will always be a need for Cloud computing, because it will always be cheaper?

[much shorter]

I don't really care about the Xbox 720, the fact that all console systems are so limited is really a dealbreaker for me. The only games I've played on consoles the last few years were Demon's Souls and Dark Souls and even then I'm pissed that I don't have more control. Now I understand that it's a necessary sacrifice in order to have a better user experience but it just ins't for me. Now I'm going to shut my mouth before they announce Dark's Demon Souls and I'll end up buying a PS4…

Well, some friends of mine who follow the industry news (business side) pointed out to me that Sony has 19 billion dollars in reserve. But what I'm more of getting at is earnings from latest pereformance from the last few years. Sony recently issued a demand to retail partners to no longer put 3D TVs up on discounted sale prices, just full retail now. And the PS3 was selling at a loss (even the PS2 sold at a loss for a while), and they've invested in Home, the PSP Go, which are each not the hottest things ever... So with the video game division not doing much performance wise and just now climbing up with the PS3, how would such a purchase even be considered?

Somewhat related, Sony shareholders recently put out their demand for the board of directors at Sony to change up, with Kaz Hirai heading it up.

Also to bring this back to MS, they have 54 billion in reserve apparently. So they could make this buy.

But both Sony and MS have other worries than their games division? Or are those reserves exclusively for their game divisions?

[Henroid]

Those were overall company reserves, not just the VG divisions.

And I guess Sony bought Gai-whatever. Which I've only recently been made aware of. If they don't tie it into Playstation Plus I can't see them doing any good with it. Strengthen existing products, not just put out more.

[Erkki]

Cloud gaming... What's the Moore's law equivalent for bandwidth? Bandwidth usage has been growning exponentially, and from watching that video I guess the US is in trouble soon for mobile bandwidth, but what about landlines?

Also, however low the added network latency can be, it's slightly funny to compare this with... if you follow John Carmack on Twitter and see him complaining about the latency of monitors being bad e.g. even just for the visuals a PC has already rendered to reach your eyes might be happening much slower than ideal.