So I think I made a decent (who knows, I didn't spark much discussion) point about the problems with turning discs into download code, and thankfully, most people had a similar viewpoint: Microsoft backtracked, more than likely after seeing the initial pre-order sales figures.
So with that hoopla out of the way and dismantled, I'd like to discuss the flipside on the system: Xbox One's cloud services will do more to put people online, and a HELL of a lot more to KEEP people online, than that braindead system could have ever hoped to accomplish.
Again, disclaimer: I have zero current plans to pick up a One. The PC covers the grand majority of games I'd want on that system anyway, and even my PS4 purchase will be dependent on whether Namco, NIS America, whoever buys Atlus, and Arc Systemworks, et al, learn how to actually release the PC version of every one of their games that they have to develop ANYWAY. ( though no, doing this is nowhere near as trivial as it sounds)
So Xbox One cloud services. There's nothing magical about them. If you want the entire first half of this explains in a moderately concise manner, check out the latest Giant Bombcast.
The fact of the matter is, it's a bunch of computers. It's a metric buck-ton of computers, and they're designed to run software in a trivial, automatically load-balancing manner. If you want more info on this sort of thing, look up "Map Reduce" or "PC Cluster" on Google. You'll find more info than you probably ever wanted on the subject.
It's a crap-ton of computers and they're all owned by Microsoft. In addition, the "price" of using these machines is probably split two ways between the licensing fee developers are ALREADY paying to make every Xbox 360 game and your Xbox Live Gold subscription. What this means is that, for all intents and purposes, this tech is free.
If you've ever played an online game whose entire online component, especially in games that keep data about your game (how you rank in a Madden football season, for instance), there've been many times where the data they kept has been beyond the scope of the console makers' (e.g. Sony/Microsoft/especially Nintendo) online components. This means that the publisher themselves need to pay for the online functionality they provide, and quite regularly. Whatmore, most publishers have no idea how in the **** de-centralized processing works, and as a result, are putting out game-specific server boxes. This means two things:
#1. Their scalability is going to be crap by design. If they build every one of these groups of servers to match launch requirements, over half would go unused after the first week. So in thinking "long-term", they will nearly always have horrifyingly broken launch periods.
#2. Their lastability is going to be even worse. "Long-term" is essentially until people stop buying new copies of the game, especially if the number of additional users hopping on starts to eclipse sales (e.g. a market that buys the game mostly used), at which point, poof, their desire to continue spending cash to maintain these servers for this purpose begins to evaporate, and after a brief period of time, so will the servers HAVING that purpose in the first place. They'll be wiped and set to function as servers for whatever the new game is, and then you go back to #1.
So Microsoft has a ton of computers for this kind of thing. From their estimates, they have enough to have access to 3 complete servers for every single concurrent Xbox One that's online at any given moment.
What does this mean for you, as a player? By taking the cost of running and maintaining servers out of the developers' and publishers' hands, you're going to look at the near-abolishment of games going "permanently offline". Whatmore, because Microsoft DOES know how to arbitrarily spin of servers and shut them down as need be, and near-instantly re-allocate machines for other purposes (if they can't, they don't have any goddamn business running a cloud platform), this means that they can easily justify spending millions of dollars on new machines in anticipation of a major online game release (say, an MMO), because once the initial load of new users dies down, they can immediately use those otherwise "idle" servers on EVERY OTHER GAME IN THEIR LIBRARY.
The biggest influx of users you're going to see on the Xbox One is going to happen at these two milestones:
- A major publisher (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.) is going to shut down their entire online infrastructure for a major game one or two years after its release due to the reasons I mentioned above. But this is only going to happen to the PS4 and/or Wii U releases of this title. The Xbox One version will still be online for years to come.
- A major publisher is going to release an incredibly online-heavy title (MMO, MOBA, freemium version of either, fighting game, persistent-world FPS, etc.) and the launch is going to be a rather dirty mess. Tons of people are going to constantly see "could not connect"-style errors.... on the two platforms that Microsoft DIDN'T release.
Second prediction? Inside of two years, Sony and/or Nintendo will sign a major deal with Google or Amazon to provide similar functionality, and it's going to be a rough first few years for them because they'll be playing a frighteningly desparate game of catch-up.
Okay, I'll save the second point (all that physics and magical power-boosting nonsense, and how it could actually be feasible) for a follow-up to this post, as I think this is already a big of a wall of text. I'm not even sure you could take this wall down without Mikhail Gorbachev's involvement.
Topic: Xbox One: The coin's shiny side. (Read 2027 times)
