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After E3... Which console are you buying?
- Thread starter WhiteIphone5
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Haven't got a chance to watch this yet, I'll do it after July 4th
ThatsMeRight said:
I know they said it, but they have no computational cloud assets that I'm aware of that can actually do it. With MS we all know it's using Azure.
ThatsMeRight said:
From the Respawn Blog:
ThatsMeRight said:I'm glad we can agree on something, haha.
It's all good, this is just discussion
Nonsense. Computational assets = servers. Where do you think PSN is run from? What do you think Sony's multiplayer servers are exactly? What exactly is Galkai going to run from?
Sony don't have a fancy name like Azure assigned to their servers, nor have they put a number on them, but cloud computing is simply a bunch of servers on the end of an internet connection. Rest assured, Sony have a whole bunch of them too, and are probably expanding them for the PS4 launch. It's simply about what tasks get assigned to the CPUs.
You're oversimplifying and treating the cloud like it's a singular piece of tech enabled by owning a server farm. You're ignoring the millions of cloud applications used to make these servers useful.
Look at SIRI, which is a good example of cloud compute. That's $200 million worth of adaptive learning and language modeling algorithms that get run off servers. You think just because MS or Sony owns a server farm, they can duplicate SIRI?
I can tell you right now unless Sony plans on paying some other company to use an Azure competitor or they have some secret R&D project nobody knows about, they're not gonna be able to duplicate Azure's cloud compute abilities at this point in time. If they did, Titanfall, Sunset Overdrive, etc would not be MS exclusives. Likewise, the XB1 is not gonna have the same streaming capabilities as the PS4 simply because MS owns a bunch of server farms. That's why Gaikai is worth over $300 million - it's streaming tech other companies can't copy.
Don't underestimate the value of cloud apps, which is what these companies are using for product differentiation. Both A and B might run off a server, but just because you can do A doesn't mean you can do B.
You really do buy in to marketing don't you?
Azure is the name for a collection of servers, nothing more. There's going to be some fancy software doing load balancing and so forth, but that's all there is to it. Amazon have exactly the same thing, but bigger, in their EC2 servers. Ultimately all these cloud servers run off exactly the same thing - CPUs, RAM and hard drives - the only difference being the software plonked on top.
You are correct that the software can be patented, such as Galkai, which prevents other people using it, but there's multiple ways in doing the same things to avoid patents (Azure vs Amazon EC2 for example, or Siri vs Samsung's S Voice). Cloud computing for games isn't going to be a massively complicated piece of technology - after all, it's just running code from a game remotely - it's simply the infrastructure that needs to be present.
MS stole a march on Sony with the announcement of this technology, but have no doubt that if it proves useful Sony can achieve the same thing.
EDIT: Also, these games are not dependent upon the cloud - they're not on the XBone because the cloud computing made the decision for them, they're on XBone because MS paid them a house full of money to do so. Titanfall, for example, is also getting a PC release...that doesn't use the cloud at all. Ergo, the cloud computing cannot be something that makes or breaks the game.
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Whether all the marketing is correct or not, let's just wait to see what kind of an impact cloud gaming really has before making any judgements.
Dude I've trashed MS's marketing more than most people on this board. I don't know how you're gonna tell me I buy into their marketing.
Azure is the name of a collection of cloud services, not servers. Yeah AWS EC2 is a competitor. What is Sony's version of this? They don't have one. So regardless of what Yoshida said, they can't do it.
Personally I think believing Yoshida's vague answer without asking how = buying into marketing. Like he was really gonna say, no we can't do it. His answer was so vague, for all we know he could've meant, third party devs if you want cloud compute tech, go spend your own money and pay Amazon to build it for you.
I don't care about patenting, I'm saying it's the apps that have unique value. Yeah Sony can develop cloud compute offloading tech later just like MS can develop streaming tech later if they need it to remain competitive. That doesn't mean anything because as of right now the PS4 games can't offload the same cloud compute data the XB1 can, and the XB1 can't stream like the PS4 can. These are product differentiators that are gonna be marketed by both companies until X-Mas to tug-a-war consumers toward each plaform. They wanna add these in 3 years from now, cool, but as right now they don't exist.
No, the PC version also uses Azure. That's a multiplayer game run off dedicated servers. Maybe they'll have client hosting too but one of the main selling points of that game is dedicated servers requiring cloud connectivity
well you obviously _are_ buying into MS marketing regarding the "power of the cloud"
i recommend reading into the actual developer comments about it ... the really big advantage of Azure is the easy dynamic,scaling of providing dedicated servers for the players
it's a huge advantage for the developers that they don't have to care about setting up infrastructre (very likely though they'll have to pay for it)
for the developers who don't experience with it (after all Titanfall developers past games were always player peer hosted) this really makes it easier
Microsoft has a a lot of experience in server side programming and has over the years really turned out to be good (opposed to 15 years ago), so i'm sure the tools andhandling of that all will be ace.
on the other side for those handling dedicated servers it in the past, they very likely have infrastructure already place (and make money renting out dedicated servers .... like EA with battlefield this generation) it might be less of a point since they rather pocket the money themselves, than paying money to microsoft
95% of this "power of the cloud" will be a service to developers and publishers. For the game o nthe couch it makes no difference who is hosting a server.
the rest they mentioned so far (persistant worlds, AI and additional physics) is something handled by dedicated servers traditionally since years ... where do people think the physics in regards to destroyed buildings connecting to the hitboxes of players is handled in Battlefield 3 on the ps3 or 360 ? in the same place the other hitbox handling is done .... a dedicated server
where are the actual cloud computing advancements for gaming ? so far i have seen zero,zip, nada which was actually "cloud related" opposed to "dedicated server related" ...
opposed to the data collection, user analysis and controlled advertising.. because all that stuff sure needs a lot of distributed computing powerhttp://www.vg247.com/2013/07/04/xbox-one-built-with-advertising-in-mind-kinect-integral-to-next-gen-adverts/
i recommend reading into the actual developer comments about it ... the really big advantage of Azure is the easy dynamic,scaling of providing dedicated servers for the players
it's a huge advantage for the developers that they don't have to care about setting up infrastructre (very likely though they'll have to pay for it)
for the developers who don't experience with it (after all Titanfall developers past games were always player peer hosted) this really makes it easier
Microsoft has a a lot of experience in server side programming and has over the years really turned out to be good (opposed to 15 years ago), so i'm sure the tools andhandling of that all will be ace.
on the other side for those handling dedicated servers it in the past, they very likely have infrastructure already place (and make money renting out dedicated servers .... like EA with battlefield this generation) it might be less of a point since they rather pocket the money themselves, than paying money to microsoft
95% of this "power of the cloud" will be a service to developers and publishers. For the game o nthe couch it makes no difference who is hosting a server.
the rest they mentioned so far (persistant worlds, AI and additional physics) is something handled by dedicated servers traditionally since years ... where do people think the physics in regards to destroyed buildings connecting to the hitboxes of players is handled in Battlefield 3 on the ps3 or 360 ? in the same place the other hitbox handling is done .... a dedicated server
where are the actual cloud computing advancements for gaming ? so far i have seen zero,zip, nada which was actually "cloud related" opposed to "dedicated server related" ...
opposed to the data collection, user analysis and controlled advertising.. because all that stuff sure needs a lot of distributed computing power
http://www.vg247.com/2013/07/04/xbox-one-built-with-advertising-in-mind-kinect-integral-to-next-gen-adverts/
But there isn't a clever bunch of apps being run from these servers, they're taking what we already had (dedicated servers), buying a lot of them and putting a name to them. The "apps" are going to be made by the game developers themselves.
What MS has (likely) done is made a dedicated server api good enough to stream video, easy enough to keep them alive for the life of the console, and priced them cheaper than existing options.
And that's another interesting point - this isn't a free service to developers.
What happens when the servers go dark? Is it another attempt from publishers forcing you to upgrade to the next game? EA have an awful server shutdown policy, will they pay to keep Azure servers going years after launch? What if a company goes bust (as it does happen quite frequently), who pays the server bills then?
It's awful tech that we don't need. If I were to buy an Xbox One I would make sure to only buy the games I want to, I wouldn't want to build up a backlog!
What MS has (likely) done is made a dedicated server api good enough to stream video, easy enough to keep them alive for the life of the console, and priced them cheaper than existing options.
And that's another interesting point - this isn't a free service to developers.
What happens when the servers go dark? Is it another attempt from publishers forcing you to upgrade to the next game? EA have an awful server shutdown policy, will they pay to keep Azure servers going years after launch? What if a company goes bust (as it does happen quite frequently), who pays the server bills then?
It's awful tech that we don't need. If I were to buy an Xbox One I would make sure to only buy the games I want to, I wouldn't want to build up a backlog!
There is a ton of potential in offloading compute to the cloud, I don't see how it's hype. The only qualifier for console games is it has to be non-realtime compute. I gave SIRI as an example of what's possible when you offload to cloud based supercomputers. That type of AI would cripple your phone if you ran it locally and would take minutes vs seconds to return a response. This past console generation, the vast majority of games used local resources entirely. Exception would be big publisher AAA games that rely on online multiplayer to sell, and MMO style games like Planetside that need world permanence to work. For every other game, nobody's using the cloud. Any game not fronted by a big publisher is forced peer to peer and single player games are all locally processed because of cost barrier.
You look at a single-player GTA type open world game. Obviously everything that requires a <100 ms response time has to be locally processed - Your character moving, collision detection, twitch based action, etc. What about the NPC AI? Right now the NPC's just walk down the street in straight lines and run away when something happens. This is all processed locally - which is why the same no-name NPC's disappear when you're not looking, your console needs to clear memory. By offloading AI, you could individualize them - give them unique routes and personalities stored in the cloud, make them a permanent part of the world, time sync their daily actions to real-time, etc. What about non-realtime environmental computations - vehicle AI on the street, the sun and planets tracking through the sky, non collision based physics. It's all simple right now because the bottleneck is your console's resources. Offload it to a cloud supercomputer, and you can get more detail, a wider variety of simulation/detail in your game.
If you're talking about dedicated multiplayer servers, that's only one application. Azure is a cloud service platform - whatever devs wanna code can be deployed. Titanfall is using it for dedicated multiplayer servers. Forza is offloading AI algorithms to the cloud. Sunset Overdrive is using it to create a more dynamic open world and for analytics. Watch Dogs is exploring offloading non-realtime physics and AI compute for the XB1 version to create a more detailed open world.
If you're talking about physical infrastructure, then yeah it's basically just dedicated servers. Because the cloud is just server farms and a game using a server farm = dedicated servers.
They're gonna have to pay but for the first time ever it's cheap as hell. MS's big contribution is they fronted enough of the cost by leveraging Azure infrastructure to make it economically viable for all developers. You don't have to be EA, Ubisoft, or Activision spending millions of dollars to build infrastructure.
An excellent example of it, but one that would benefit this generation of consoles and not the next-gen. A GTA world wouldn't need a whole city to be kept alive (for all the millions of people who play it, when do the servers stop calculating say, if you stop playing for a while). It just needs new behaviours to download and a persistent-world update which can all be handled on boot - the Animal Crossing "preparing town" screen.
I'd still like to know who would pay for servers once the game is a few years old or if the studio or publisher goes bankrupt/closes down. I wonder if MS has made allowances for that, if Azure is a one-off payment or annual.
Maybe I am getting old and grumpy.
The last thing I want is for my game's performance to be dependent on the quality of my internet connection and the availability of servers. That goes against everything console gaming stands for in my opinion.
I always disliked PC gaming, cause it gave me the responsibility of tailoring my system to the requirements of the latest games. "Will it run on my machine? What components do I need to upgrade to have the game run smoothly?"
I like console gaming cause it shifts that responsibility to the game developer. My system specs are fixed and solidly defined. It's the developer's job to tailor their game for optimal performance on my system.
Now this whole offloading-processing-jobs-to-the-cloud thing adds another variable, one that is hard to predict and rely on. Will we notice the game get slower and choppy when the servers are down? Will I try to avoid peak times to enjoy the best performance? What will happen a few years down the road, when the game's popularity is fading, and the servers are needed to support the latest and newest games?
All that can only be speculated right now. All I can say is that I really do not like the idea of adding this variable to the mix. I want solid reliable performance, I want the game to be optimized to my system's specs - not "my system and an army of cloud servers"! Yes, this also means only getting a bump in specs every ~7 years when the next generation of consoles comes around, I am totally fine with that.
And now get off my lawn, you dang kids with your fancy cloud servers!
The last thing I want is for my game's performance to be dependent on the quality of my internet connection and the availability of servers. That goes against everything console gaming stands for in my opinion.
I always disliked PC gaming, cause it gave me the responsibility of tailoring my system to the requirements of the latest games. "Will it run on my machine? What components do I need to upgrade to have the game run smoothly?"
I like console gaming cause it shifts that responsibility to the game developer. My system specs are fixed and solidly defined. It's the developer's job to tailor their game for optimal performance on my system.
Now this whole offloading-processing-jobs-to-the-cloud thing adds another variable, one that is hard to predict and rely on. Will we notice the game get slower and choppy when the servers are down? Will I try to avoid peak times to enjoy the best performance? What will happen a few years down the road, when the game's popularity is fading, and the servers are needed to support the latest and newest games?
All that can only be speculated right now. All I can say is that I really do not like the idea of adding this variable to the mix. I want solid reliable performance, I want the game to be optimized to my system's specs - not "my system and an army of cloud servers"! Yes, this also means only getting a bump in specs every ~7 years when the next generation of consoles comes around, I am totally fine with that.
And now get off my lawn, you dang kids with your fancy cloud servers!
Maybe I am getting old and grumpy.
The last thing I want is for my game's performance to be dependent on the quality of my internet connection and the availability of servers. That goes against everything console gaming stands for in my opinion.
I always disliked PC gaming, cause it gave me the responsibility of tailoring my system to the requirements of the latest games. "Will it run on my machine? What components do I need to upgrade to have the game run smoothly?"
I like console gaming cause it shifts that responsibility to the game developer. My system specs are fixed and solidly defined. It's the developer's job to tailor their game for optimal performance on my system.
Now this whole offloading-processing-jobs-to-the-cloud thing adds another variable, one that is hard to predict and rely on. Will we notice the game get slower and choppy when the servers are down? Will I try to avoid peak times to enjoy the best performance? What will happen a few years down the road, when the game's popularity is fading, and the servers are needed to support the latest and newest games?
All that can only be speculated right now. All I can say is that I really do not like the idea of adding this variable to the mix. I want solid reliable performance, I want the game to be optimized to my system's specs - not "my system and an army of cloud servers"! Yes, this also means only getting a bump in specs every ~7 years when the next generation of consoles comes around, I am totally fine with that.
And now get off my lawn, you dang kids with your fancy cloud servers!
Well, crap. Of the 101 times I mashed the upvote button, only one was registered.
In an Animal Crossing type game, yeah all you'd need is a daily download but I could picture Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout enhancing their worlds by using the cloud. It's pretty much up to devs to milk it or ignore it.
I have no clue how server dependence will pan out. Games that are online required, I'd expect to die with the servers, which I don't think is good either.
But Devs can also do what Insomnia is doing with Sunset Overdrive. That game has a playable offline version, which you can think of as a baseline mode, plus a mode that taps the cloud when available to enhance the baseline with cloud compute. Watch Dogs seems to be going that route for the XB1 version too, though they haven't committed to anything.
If you do any kind of online multiplayer, you're already dependent on those.
If you're talking devs not maximizing console resources because they're using the cloud as a crutch, then yeah that's a good a point. But your local console has static specs and architecture anyway. The only stuff devs can offload is non-realtime compute. If the devs really want to explore it, we should end up getting better games as a result, not worse ones. Better because local clock cycles that traditionally do mundane things like making an NPC walk around a block can be used for more important stuff. And mundane stuff like making an NPC walk around a block can be enhanced by being passed to a supercomputer for remote processing.
In the end, whoever doesn't like the cloud and wants 100% local computing should just pick up a PS4 because that's what they'll get. Only new PS4 games I've heard using cloud compute are the Division, because Ubisoft paid Cloudscaling millions to build them a server farm for persistent world elements, and Destiny, because Activision is using a server farm enhance the gameworld. Considering Sony doesn't have infrastructure or capabilitiy to subsidize something like Azure, PS4 games should end up following the same architecture as PS3 games.
Of course online multiplayer requires an internet connection. Not necessarily dedicated servers though? Depends on the game... Online multiplayer is an afterthought for me anyways. I am talking about making "better games" by using the cloud servers to help with the processing. How will these games perform without those servers?
You keep saying this, but that doesn't make it any more factual. We simply don't know at this point what they're gonna do, to what extent they will utilize their cloud servers. I certainly hope you are right though.
rezenclowd3
macrumors 65816
All I see for all forms of computer gaming is our lack of control to host and play multiplayer games. The cloud, PSN and XBL all serve the companies best interests: to move product.
The PS4 should be the better buy (for me). It's cheaper, it features better performance (specs-wise) it's smaller, better looking and does not rely on Kinect-connectivity nonsense.
However, Xbox One has Forza. And I'm a giant fan of the series, having played plenty of FM2, FM3, FM4 and Horizon. Moreover, I enjoy Xbox Live and the achievement system, as well as the social bits. This generation, my PS3 ended up collecting dust, while my 360 has run warm.
That said, I guess it depends a lot on what console my friends will be getting, as well as the availability of racing games for the PS4. I was so disappointed with GT5, that I probably won't purchase GT6.
For now, I've pre-ordered both, but I'll only be getting one of the two.
However, Xbox One has Forza. And I'm a giant fan of the series, having played plenty of FM2, FM3, FM4 and Horizon. Moreover, I enjoy Xbox Live and the achievement system, as well as the social bits. This generation, my PS3 ended up collecting dust, while my 360 has run warm.
That said, I guess it depends a lot on what console my friends will be getting, as well as the availability of racing games for the PS4. I was so disappointed with GT5, that I probably won't purchase GT6.
For now, I've pre-ordered both, but I'll only be getting one of the two.
Hey guys, did you hear the rumor that EA wants to start charging $80 for PS4/Xbone games...
That's pretty crazy
That's pretty crazy
Only a problem if you insist on buying on/around launch day.
I usually wait about half a year after release, and then buy games for around 20 bucks from amazon UK. The next gen will probably be the same.
That's only a problem if you buy EA games on launch day!
I can't find any EA game in my library that wasn't bought in a Steam sale for a few ££ or second hand for console, for a few ££.
And also, to answer the original question: No, I have not heard that rumor.
Any chance you are actually starting this rumor here, so you can brag about it later in the "confess your sins" thread?
Any chance you are actually starting this rumor here, so you can brag about it later in the "confess your sins" thread?
And also, to answer the original question: No, I have not heard that rumor.
Any chance you are actually starting this rumor here, so you can brag about it later in the "confess your sins" thread?
Naw bro look it up. GameStop uk pretty much confirmed it.
The thing is, if we do end up paying for it, then other companies are going to start doing the same ****.
