"Games were you can have lots of players in a single environment interacting in new ways."
How is this different from how purchases from PSN, XBL, Steam, etc work? (Legit don't know)Such as the experience of losing access to all your games when your cloud provider goes under.
Stadia didn't actually have games that showed this promise and Google never really invested in games. They bailed before even trying. Microsoft is doling it with titles like Flight Simulator.
I'll believe it when I play it. Stop with the theoretical and start develop games that take advantage of cloud computing.
Came here to say this.
I've never used any of them either, so I don't know how their DRM works on local files actually. Which is why I hadn't thought of it.How is this different from how purchases from PSN, XBL, Steam, etc work? (Legit don't know)
Says the Technology Will Allow Previously Impossible Game Experiences
Isn't Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 already using the Power of the Cloud™ for something that'd be unfeasible offline (huge amount of data streaming to match the scale of the real world)?
Hey how about showing us? They can use one of their many new companies they bought or created to create a concept for this working, like the astrobot game showcasing the dualsense 5. And them slowly drive adoption within the other companies.
Join Xbox Game Studios as an innovative leader and help us achieve our mission to reach over 3 billion gamers.
We are seeking a Senior Director, Cloud Gaming to shape and drive a new initiative focused on making great games designed for the cloud. You will partner with external developers to create a roadmap for producing new game products, plus building an internal team to navigate relationships between partner teams within Xbox and Microsoft, bringing new cloud-based technologies into our games.
We are closer now than when they first said it. They will be the first big video game company to really show it off since the other two aren't there. So I see nothing wrong with the statement.
edit: never mind we are there with flight simulator
Hell, MS themselves said that with the Xbox One.
I really want to see it, too.
Yes, I believe it streams in the map data along with other info like real-time weather and live air traffic control data.
Where things are getting interesting is that companies are starting to add levels of services that aren't just raw compute and storage, but that are dedicated specifically to gaming. That's exactly what PlayFab was. PlayFab was one of the first companies providing a set of services that lives in the cloud that you as a developer could use in your game, and you didn't have to worry about running the server.... You can use a service like a leaderboard, or our matchmaker, or our analytics, or content updates, or any of those services we offer. You get to just use the service, and it just works without having to worry about updating or managing it.
GR: So you're providing a lot of backend infrastructure for the online components of games, and part of the appeal of that is it's pre-packaged and scalable, so developers can rely on that instead of having to do it themselves.
JG: Exactly, and because of that it speeds up development, and as a developer you can focus on the good bits and the fun bits instead of focusing on infrastructure that, frankly, you just want it to work and you don't want to focus on.
JG: Well, I love talking about Flight Simulator. In my mind, this is the perfect example of a cloud-native game that would not be possible without the cloud. But I would parse what you said a little more narrowly: it's not that this is a game that was only possible at the scale of a Microsoft. It was only possible at the scale of the cloud. One of the cool things is you don't have to be a very big company to be able to use the cloud at that level.
One of the things this game did that was so remarkable was that it took satellite data from all over the earth... so that AI could take the satellite images and imply geometry, and make up geometry for the whole planet in a way that would have been impossible for humans to do. It would've been tens of thousands of artists building the earth in 3D, but the computer can do it. Once you've built the model once and it works, once you've trained it, you can run the model on the entire earth. And, it only took 72 hours. It took a massive amount of compute power, but that's the advantage of the cloud. You can grab thousands of servers for 72 hours and then release them when you're done. That's expensive, but you don't have to be a big company to do that. You can lease the data from somewhere and rent the server space.
The answers are pretty reasonable considering the context.GR: To shift a bit, how do you see this future of creation and delivery of content through the cloud integrating with platforms like VR and mobile?
JG: ...We have a number of "industry priority scenarios." It doesn't roll of the tongue, but they're things that we think the industry really cares about today that may be pain points that we're trying to help with. The first one on our list of five is to accelerate game production with the cloud....
This act of content creation, once you have it in the cloud, distribution becomes more fluid. We see this with Xcloud. It started out as just racking Xboxes in datacenters and streaming it. Now we're getting more experience with it, and you may be able to build game experiences that would not be possible without running in the cloud. Games were you can have lots of players in a single environment interacting in new ways...
Xcloud was about putting Xboxes in the cloud *laugh* but the broader term is pixel streaming, where you're running GPUs in the cloud and streaming it down. Initially pixel streaming is going to be useful in non-gaming scenarios like architecture or retail where you want a 3D experience but you don't have to have the hardware. That will then move into gaming and you'll se developers leveraging experiences that go beyond what was possible before.
But I wouldn't say it's impossible. Real time real weather, real traffic are very cool, but ultimately it would be the same game without it. Same for satellite imaginery. Enhanced by cloud more like.
Microsoft has been showing the next Microsoft Flight Simulator and one of the things the company, along with Asobo, has been telling us is that they are going to stream the geo data to our computers.
Now, in a world where YouTube, Twitch, Netflix and other services are very well-known by our users, and where companies such as Google are trying to push game streaming into the market, it's quite understandable that the word "streaming" may cause some confusion in some simmer's minds.
Browsing around the interwebs (and especially on social media) we can find things such as "the performance of Microsoft Flight Simulator will depend on your internet speed because the game is rendered on the cloud", or "you can't play offline because the game is streamed into your computer".
Its just really hard to make well, and whatever game is made with the cloud wont be that accesible thanks to connection issues. The tech itself though is pretty transformative, there are already some games MS themselves made that use it to great effect, like Flight Simulator 2020.Before people come in with the lazy takes, think about it for a moment.
In the traditional online game model, the game logic has the be synchronized over the internet, from server to players. This inherently limits the scope of games because event is delayed by significant ping.
But in the cloud model, the game logic is synchronized over the local network in the same data center. It does open up new possibilities. Just because it hasn't been done, doesn't mean it's not a real possibility.
It's why Crackdown 3 was the most beloved and critically acclaimed game of the past decade