Auto-correction problem. I meant to say "I want to see in EVERY big-budget game going forward", not "speedy". I don't know how that happened.
Between that, my newlines getting ignored and my somehow getting logged out in the middle of a correction, not quite my day in the Gamespot commenting system.
I would be more concerned bout how they can use the raw horsepower (on PC or next-gen consoles) to improve the ACTUAL RENDERING. Things like how good skin looks, how much crap you can stuff into a scene. Larger worlds, more crowded worlds, further line of sight in a manner that actually contributes to gameplay (sniping simulator? I don't know). The point is, most current gen games are simply cleverly designed to put their best foot right in the middle of the scene and blur out the rest of the background. It's either a depth of field effect, or excessive shininess everywhere, or really crappy background textures. The only things that look good most of the time, are character models and weapons in case of first-person shooters. The rest of the effort is spent in pulling off big effects that you won't be looking too closely at anyway.Few games have been good with the attention to detail and filling scenes with at least decent-looking crap - like the original Crysis and the Uncharted series. But with the additional horsepower available with next-gen it would free up a much wider range of developers to put more detail (actual, interactive detail. Not just richer wallpapers) into their games. That's what would really excite me.
The MGS V playthrough was a good example of that. Rain spattering off all surfaces. Smooth, lifelike (obviously mo-capped) animations everywhere. Camera zooming from nasty scars out all over to a sprawling, living complex with people doing stuff even in areas you can only see out of a corner of the screen. All with nary a snag. Now I don't know what they were running it on, but that's (and hey Ryse was looking pretty good too) the kind of detail I want to see in speedy big-budget game going forward.
Looks great. Changing up the boss fights is nice but I don't know how much I'll enjoy the other changes, or if they change the overall feel of the game. I did, after all, love the game as a bonafide Deus Ex successor in spite of its flaws (and the super-annoying boss fights). I'm gonna wait for the reviews to pour in before buying this one.
I only saw Ryan when he did some video news pieces for Gamespot. Always liked him being on, though I was surprised to find out about his sense of humor, considering how straight those news sections were. Sounds like a guy who'll be missed. :(
@Vodoo @DKant That's actually a good amount of money :) I wasn't aware of those numbers. But it is worth thinking about that Microsoft probably already spends a chunk of that money (not much though) on the base infrastructure for XBox Live and costs we can't directly account for. And now they're adding to the costs with the cloud infrastructure AS WELL as the free games. All at the same price of 60$ a year.
Let's just do a quick calculation here. I've used the Amazon cloud before, so I'll use that as a reference. Anyone who has experience on Azure could chip in with the equivalents.
An "Extra Large" "Heavy Utilization Reserved" instance from Amazon's list sounds like a really good server for realtime multiplayer.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
A 3-year commitment costs about 2200$, so roughly 700$ per year. Since Amazon is super-low-margin, let's just assume that 700$ IS the running and maintenance cost of each such server per year (forget about procurement costs, although I'm sure that's at least partially covered in these costs). It could cost a lot more for more powerful servers, say with more CPU, etc.
Since Microsoft mentioned they had 300,000 dedicated servers for XBox Cloud, that's 210 million $ per year for all those servers. Or a little more if their machines are more powerful.
That's something, but it IS minuscule compared to the cool 1.44 Billion gross they make off XBox Live, considering roughly 50% of their 48million subscribers are Gold:
http://betanews.com/2013/06/28/battle-tested-microsofts-cloud-services-by-the-numbers/ (hunt in the article for the XBox Live subscription numbers)
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/microsoft-only-50-percent-of-xbox-live-users-pay-for-gold-subscription/ (old, and biased article, but I don't think the percentage would have changed much)
So for the XBox cloud to be viable, and not a loss-making way to cement their position (as usual), XBox Live needs to generate a profit of at LEAST 210 million $ for Microsoft annually (out of the 1.44 Billion it supposedly makes anyway). Meaning a margin of at LEAST about 15% and that's NOT including the additional margin they would need to pay for the "free" games.
So in other words, Xbox Live needs to have been turning in a nice chunk of profit (not just revenue, which is huge) for Microsoft for the cloud thing to be viable.
So in this generation at least Microsoft is offering some real value for that Gold subscription. But 50$ a year seems a bit cheap to fund enough of these servers AND all the other things they'd already be spending those 50 on - free games, support, etc.
Will be interesting to see how far this infrastructure actually gets used and how will the costs scale (will Microsoft allow a 20$ game that extensively uses cloud infrastructure? At this point, somehow I doubt it)
All Sony and Microsoft are doing are making the sensible decision to chuck any notion of exclusive architectures in favor of one that most developers can understand and code towards. I'm not entirely sure WHY they are doing it - maybe feedback from their multi-platform publishing partners, maybe the realisation that service and exclusives (really, exclusives) are what matter more than raw horsepower, maybe the remote notion of a threat from mobile and mobile-inspired initiatives like Ouya which will make game development even MORE accessible and profitable for the thousands of mobile game developers out there. Maybe a pre-emptive strike against SteamBox (games can be coded to a standard PC-like architecture, be secured within a walled-garden kind of marketplace, and it all happens through someone as trusted and beloved as Valve ....good deal for developers).
Whatever, the reason, it's a good call - even if it makes them seem a bit tame (I was a little disappointed neither Microsoft nor Sony were trying something new on the hardware front).
DKant's comments