One of the most potentially damaging things a consumer electronics company can do to one of its existing products is confirm its replacement. So when Nintendo announced yesterday that its Wii "successor" would launch next year, the obvious question was how would the news affect its highly successful but flagging current-generation console?
Ben 10 Omniverse 2 followed the commendable original title with a lacklustre cash-in. Such a shame for the kids.
Devin Rardin: Xbox's next console could be a significant jump, putting the pressure on PlayStation to counter with a big generational jump of its own.
$70b isn't all talk people. Microsoft has been saying for 13 years now that they plan to do away with hardware in the future. When people say stuff, listen. They're not hiding their plans, you're just not listening. The goal is the cloud, not hardware. And they have been spending money to get the industry there as well as leveraging their other divisions towards it. This is not all talk. This is a potential industry changing moment and the consumers in general are going to decide this, not people on N4G.You know, that same consumers who keep buying all the games we complain about being annual repeats with no advancements or Fortnite skins or all the other things we don't like? Those consumers.
The problem is, you can have the perfect infrastructure for cloud and stuff, but can you upgrade everyone's routers? Can you help every single one of them to position their router for better signal? There are too many variables outside of MS control.
We will get there some days, but regardless of power, a great is great not because it has the power of the cloud, but because it is actually a fun and polished game.
Not even just people's home connections, But the number of hops the data has to go through in order to get from their server to your system, the distance between adding several milliseconds per hop, and the fact that in order to render at 60 frames per second, you have to get all of the data you need to draw that frame back within 16 milliseconds, even fiber optic internet connections don't consistently have pings below 16 milliseconds. Especially when the server they are connecting to Is any more than a few states away from them.
You will have one first party exclusive a year with third party support and indies. Third party is also where Nintendo is going with stronger hardware for it.
Gaas and multiplayer games are a mixed bag and if they are not F2p, they are doa.
MS bought third party that made most of their money on PS... elder online, minecraft, cod, diablo... will they continue to bring money as ms exclusives? Who knows?
PC is also a mixed bag with torrents.
Subs are also a mixed bag with too many of them. Are people willing to pay 5 subs/$15 a month???
Cloud is also a mixed bag with tech and infrastructure.
As a gamer that is aware... aka woke, what I see is: Diablo garbage, Starfield/Fallout lies and garbage, WOW hard core garbage, Cod has a cool campaign but garbage, Doom...good music. Elder scrolls online... it makes money, Minecraft... idk how it makes money.
Sony must do one AAA a year, remain good third party relationships and be fine. VR2 is a mistake but hey.
Nintendo is on another lv. With third party running in handheld mode.. huhuhuuuuu Switch 2 is bad ass serious.
Sony can only Bungie themselves and that will be the end. Live gaas sub trash model of games... and tbh
they will do exactly that.
Jim Rayan will burn Sony to the ground... not MS.
MS does indeed want to end consoles. But I don’t think it will be able to destroy PlayStation. I think before anything like that happens, Sony will forge an alliance or merger with a company willing to share the spoils in exchange to get a foothold within the industry, then MS will have its hands full. And this is the worst case scenario for Sony. Best case is, PlayStation continues to demolish xbox as it has been doing so far.
got people out here still playing offline or with connections so bad that they just use internet to download games. Cloud gaming is a dream and will be for a long time
Christopher I am listening. Ms is trying trying to force change but the buyer prevents it. In no way does ms plan work. They will be punished again by the consumer just like last gen.
"Microsoft has been saying for 13 years now that they plan to do away with hardware in the future."
I don´t think you understood this project for MS´s next gen console (hardware) at all.
This new system will be POWERED by both top level hardware (as far cost/benefit for console are concerned) and Cloud!
If anything, it has the potential to be the most powerful console in the market!
Phil said many times that Cloud is not build to provide high fidelity graphics and performance, you can only achieve that via hardware.
If you´re expecting Xbox to leave hardware and high performance gaming for Sony, you´re setting yourself for nothing, but a surprise.
The Cloud is nothing more than another revenue stream to MS.
@Obscure: You're why they're going to get what they want. You're not listening to them.
***“I think you’re going to see lower priced hardware as part of our ecosystem when you think about streaming sticks and other things that somebody might want to just go plug into their TV and go play via xCloud,” says Spencer. “You could imagine us even having something that we just included in the Game Pass subscription that gave you an ability to stream xCloud games to your television and buying the controller.”
Nobody is arguing that physical consoles won’t have an important role to play in the world of video games over the next decade or so. If that weren’t true I’d probably be talking more about Stadia and Luna—streaming-only platforms—then xCloud, which views streaming as an augmentation to existing ways of playing games. But to hear Spencer talk in this way, it definitely sounds like the company wants to be prepared for a world where people warm up to the idea of playing games on their TVs without consoles. The company is re-orienting so that its main product isn’t really Xbox hardware, so much, but the Game Pass subscription that can be sold and accessed through multiple devices.***
Series S is just the start. Their future plans are cheaper hardware with Cloud streaming being the focus, which is the hardware they're talking about with the FTC documents. And they're already talking about just using sticks for the future.
So now MS is back to blowing "clouds" of smoke up everyone's asses like they did with Xbox One.
"PS4 isn't more powerful! We will have games with cloud assisted rendering and physics that will blow away anything PS4 can do!"
We all saw how that turned out... one game launched with extremely limited cloud physics assistance, and it was nothing to write home about. PS4 remained the most powerful console until the mid-gen refresh consoles dropped.
The fact of the matter is, even the best internet connections out there do not have the latency low enough to be able to do cloud assisted rendering, and that's even with servers nearby. In order to do cloud assisted rendering, you have to send the data needed for the frame to a server, have the server have enough time to do the calculation, and then get the data back from the server in less than 16 milliseconds in order to be able to draw the frame fast enough to display the image at 60 frames per second. Most people's ping isn't even lower than 16 milliseconds, meaning that even if you were only sending one bit of data to the server, and the server didn't have to do any processing at all, all that had to do was send that bit back, you still wouldn't get it back in time to draw the frame.
Microsoft already got caught in that lie once, and here they are trying to do it again. That just shows they plan on releasing another weak console like the Xbox series s, and then using cloud hype to try to get people to buy into it.
Cloud assisted consoles are a long way off yet, much farther than 2028. By the time they are feasible, it would be more economical just to game completely in the cloud with no local processing done whatsoever.
Or instead of forcing 16ms they will just force the console to wait... for your 400ms ping. Yikes.
They can totally do Cloud Assisted Rendering right now, but it wouldn't even be considered a passable interactive experience for even the most casual gamers, never mind the dedicated core base.
Personally, I'd love to see a functional demo like what MS showed of Crackdown 3's city-wide destruction running in a real world network environment. We all know MS can't do it because latency is way too high...
Anyway, Nvidia's Omniverse already does all this stuff in the here and now, it's just made to streamline collaboration in a less demanding, but still interactive way. It's in a different market bracket, not made for highly responsive gaming situations.
They are going to milk the casuals by charging per feature on top of the services. They're building the base now with Game Pass but eventually it's going to be no more consoles, just you can play straight from your tablet, TV, or phone with these additional options:
4k 60fps with Raytracing for $49.99 per month
1440p 60fps for $29.99 per month
HD 60fps for $19.99 per month
But even then, from a technical perspective, it isn't going to work for games that require split second accuracy. Go measure the input lag on any cloud based game, and you'll see what I mean. Even on the best connections, you're still lagging too far behind to run a game like Call of Duty or Street Fighter and be able to pull off shots/attacks fast enough to be competitive. There is a noticeable lag with online cloud gaming, and this will also apply even if some of the calculations are done locally. There's a reason why all the smoke and mirrors Microsoft created with "Xbox One will overpower PS4 with cloud assisted rendering" never actually materialized into anything. It couldn't... the internet just wasn't (and still isn't) ready for it.
This video illustrates it, on Microsoft's own servers, no less...
https://www.youtube.com/wat...
Look at those input lag amounts, in milliseconds, and then remember that 1 frame at 60fps is 16ms... Xbox Cloud has 130ms of lag, that's more than 8 frames of lag for every command you input. Imagine trying to play Street Fighter competitively with 8 frames of lag... Trying to frame count your moves...
Now imagine if the graphics in your game rely on this... your game is drawing at 60fps, a frame every 16ms, but the ray tracing isn't sending data back for 130ms...
"Nothing because it's all talk"
That´s what some people said back in 2017 when Phil said he would invest and acquire new first party studios.
Didn't they feed us this line of horse manure when the released the xbox 360 about cloud power
Exactly. I keep remembering that most of the changes that Microsoft has been trying to force onto gaming aren't things that consumers even asked for. These changes don't make things any better for gamers only Microsoft whatever Sony does it should remembering not to force it on people for PS6.
By disrupting it. And if Nintendo finds another Blue Ocean, I expect copy cats..lol. :)
I'll allow you to come up with your own analogies ;P