I think maybe the fact that bots and npc's are only marginally smarter than they were a decade ago plays a big factor.

Take a game like Rainbow Six Siege. There are games where the attacking team rushes in all together at once and pushes the objective. Other times they will flank around and attempt to play it stealthy. Other times its a team chock full of shield operators tea bagging in front of every camera. That's just on the attacking team. It's just as varied on defense.

You can't find AI that is that varied, and complex. Of course with human players, you also get incredibly stupid and hilarious things that happen, that scripted events couldn't reproduce. Compare all this to SP games where the enemies always spawn in the same places, and do basically the same things and it's not hard to see why so many people prefer MP games these days.

Honestly after playing MP games for so long now, most SP games bore me to death within minutes, and I used to be a huge SP guy. Much like cars, the learning curve may be deep, the ride a bit stiff, but it's hard to go back to driving an Accord after learning to properly drive a Ferrari.

@michaelmikado: We'll just have to agree to disagree on some of these points. Good to know that MS has the Play Anywhere games covered though, along with thousands of third party games. Some of their older exclusives may be a bit more complicated to get going though as you stated.

My final thoughts are this.

One guy says this.

Amazon is not a gaming company. Google isn't. Sony is a gaming company, but they don't have a cloud presence," said Steve Perlman, former CEO of cloud gaming company OnLive. "Then you have Microsoft — Microsoft has both of those things."

Perlman knows the challenges this market presents. He founded OnLive in 2007, and ultimately sold assets to Sony in 2015, a year after Sony announced a game streaming service, PlayStation Now."

"There are only a few companies in the world with the resources to make a game streaming service real at a global scale," the statement said. "Out of those companies, only Microsoft has years of first-hand experience in the key areas that are vital to making this a great experience for gamers: cloud (to support and scale a quality experience), content (whether first-party or not, designing technology with developers to make gaming libraries accessible from anywhere) and community (having built the first-of-its-kind Xbox Live and evolved it over the last 15+ years).

You say this.

but I'll give you some hints. I'm a sys admin who recently moved 2 10000+ plus users to MS cloud services and O365. I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE MS Azure services. I built an entire SaaS model medical software ordering system using 3 different data farms for performance, redundancy, and data recovery. As such I have a good idea of MS's limitations in the space and its strengths. You have ZERO idea what you are talking about. If AWS upped the price, Sony just finds datafarms running the specs they need and spin up VMs on them. That's the point! Sony isn't stuck with AWS by any means at all. The reason it works is because AWS is the single biggest provider for AMD cloud services that Sony needs and the amount Sony spends helps subsidize AWS growth. It's exactly how Netflix works. They just snatch up the local server farm providers that meet their specifications. That's all. They don't need to own their own server farms because it limits your physical location and your reach while increasing you startup capital, cost and maintenance.

One of these guys has intricate knowledge of how game streaming works, and was the CEO of Onlive. The other is a system administrator who has knowledge and hangs out in System Wars.

Don't take any offense if I believe the other guys word over yours.

Good day!

@slimdogmilionar: Yeah, the Ford/Enterprise analogy was a poor one. I was merely trying to point out the silliness of saying that Sony has a massive advantage going forward in streaming when their whole service will be dictated by a competitor.

I keep hearing the comparison to Netflix, and how they don't own their servers, and how despite Amazon competing with them, that they still rent servers to them. The comparison doesn't really translate though. Simply streaming video doesn't require the unique hardware upgrades that strraming games does. There's enough companies out there, that if Amazon decided to deny Netflix access to their servers, there is enough other options out there for Netflix to use... and succeed anyway. So it's just lost business.

With game streaming it's a bit different though. If Amazon decided to deny Sony access at some point, it's not like Sony would have tons of other options out there. The other options out there are all getting into offering their own game streaming services as well. Amazon knows that in this situation, Sony couldn't just go elsewhere like Netflix, and still succeed. They could literally force Sony to price itself out of the market by continuing to charge Sony more and more as Sony becomes more reliant upon them. All while ramping up their own service at a much cheaper price. They then get to enjoy the profits from PSNOW, while slowly migrating many of those users over to their service over time as PSNOW becomes more and more expensive.

Everything here of course I'd speculation for the most part. None of knows exactly what these companies have in store, or who will do what.

@michaelmikado: It seems as though you're trying to just console fanboy a bit at this point with your last couple of posts. This is System Wars though, so you're in the right place.

You're theories have several holes in them though. Every time either myself or someone else poses the problem with what you're saying, your explanation only leads to more problems with what you're saying.

• You state that MS is at a serious disadvantage compared to Sony due to Azure being utilized by Nvidia hardware despite MS games already working on Nvidia driven pcs.

• You explain the options that MS can take in order to get their infrastructure in line to streaming their games.

• Upon finding out that MS is already well underway with one of your previously mentioned options, suddenly that option becomes invalid, and won't really work that well.

• Upon being informed that MS games now days run on Nvidia GPUs and are thus in line with their Azure counterparts... Game saves is now the issue, despite all MS game saves already being saved on the cloud currently.

• Now you've moved yet again to financials, and are pointing out how much money PSNOW makes... Which has nothing to do with what we're talking about. You're beginning to stray into ronvalencia territory here.

• Now you're willing to explain why MS's cloud was laughed at in 2013, but Sony's cloud in 2019 is different, when nobody has really asked for that. For what it's worth, Xbox using cloud compute for Forza and Titanfall 1 worked as advertised. They weren't talking about streaming in 2013.

I'm not trying to bag on you, or demean you or anything. Your explanations, and terminology makes it obvious that you are versed in the subject, but the more people question you, the more it just looks like you're trying to find reasons why MS can't do it. First it was Nvidia rather than AMD, then it was how they're implementing AMD, then it was game save data, etc..

Still using Gears 4 as an example. If I start the game on a Nvidia run pc, and then start playing later on my xbox, I pick up where I left off. I would assume streaming would be the same. All MS game saves are saved on the cloud. Why would that suddenly stop working? That makes no sense. The service switching dynamically shouldn't matter, because the service they have now switches dynamically, is saved on the cloud, and works just fine. If you're streaming, the saves on the cloud that it retrieves currently, doesn't suddenly not work just because you begin streaming rather than playing it locally.

^This guy gets it!!!

We can debate the finer tech points. Some of us can learn a few things, and the points brought up are interesting.

The overall bigger picture presented here by some is absurd though. We can discuss the hurdles MS has when it comes to streaming, and criticize some of their methods used. That's fine, but to argue that Sony has all this infrastructure in place, and is a leader in cloud computing is beyond me. It's like trying to debate which car manufacturer is better Ford or Enterprise. Then explaining how Enterprise is better because of all their infrastructure and such is better. It's honestly LOL worthy.

@michaelmikado: I see the points you're trying to make, and frankly it makes sense to a degree, but let me put out an example and you explain it.

Let's use Gears 4 as an example as it's a rather recent MS game.

Gears 4 works on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. If MS wanted to stream this game, MS could use Azure to stream it to any pc or mobile device using the pc version of the game no?

The xbox blades that MS is currently installing would be used if YOU WANT TO STREAM TO AN XBOX CONSOLE. The emphasis here is to mean that if you want to stream to an xbox console, then the blades make sense. The console would need the very specific AMD run version to be streamed due to the console not being flexible due to it being very specific and optimized hardware.

So if you wanted to stream Gears 4, how would Azure being backboned by Nvidia GPU's not be possible when Gears 4 runs just fine on any pc that uses Nvidia hardware? You've said that they would need to run the xbox version, but almost all MS titles these days are Play Anywhere games that can easily run on either AMD, or Nvidia hardware.

There's something I must be missing here, because while your arguments are informative, I can't them around the fact I stated above. So to wrap this up. Yes, I completely agree with you if only an AMD version of MS titles existed like Sony's games do. I also could agree if we were only talking about streaming xbox versions of games to xbox consoles. Where I can't get on board with you is if I wanted to stream a MS game to any device such as pc, mobile, etc...

@juarbles: @michaelmikado: We call him ronbot for a very good reason.

Yup, you're right. Just wishful thinking.

My sarcasm previously aside.

No he didn't. MS has the infrastructure to build upon. Azure using Nvidia powered VM's really has zero effect on their streaming capabilities. He's claiming that MS games that currently work just fine on Nvidia hardware can't be streamed using Azure.... Because it's using Nvidia hardware.

No need for a fancy answer with buzzwords, technical jargon, and spreadsheet abbreviated words changes the fact that what he's claiming his patently false.

Now there are some things in his posts that are true, but his overall assumption is that Sony has the upper hand with their infrastructure and hardware, when they own almost none of it. MS meanwhile which owns some of its infrastructure, and all of its hardware is at a serious disadvantage.