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XBox (Games) Cloud Microsoft Entertainment Games Hardware Technology

Microsoft's Next-Gen Xbox Will Focus On 'XCloud' Game Streaming (theverge.com) 127

Posted by BeauHD from the no-strings-attached dept.
One big area that Microsoft is focusing on with its next-generation Xbox is game streaming. According to a report from Thurrott.com, Microsoft is working on two new Xbox consoles. The "Xbox Two" will be a console similar to that of the Xbox One and Xbox 360, with updated hardware and specs. The other Xbox console in development will be limited to streaming games. The Verge reports: The streaming-only console will reportedly include a low amount of local compute for handling tasks like controller input, image processing, and collision detection. These tasks are essential to reducing latency in game streaming, and Microsoft is said to be planning to slice up processing between the game running locally and in the cloud in order to reduce input lag and other image processing delays. Microsoft is currently developing its next-generation Xbox console under the Scarlett codename. The software giant recently revealed it's also working on a game streaming service for Xbox that will work across any device. This is a key part of Microsoft's future plans with Xbox, and part of the company's vision for developing its "Netflix for video games" service, Xbox Game Pass.

Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is currently "all hands" on creating datacenters capable of powering the company's game streaming service. Referred to as codename "XCloud" internally, Microsoft has been experimenting with combining four lots of custom Xbox consoles into a single server blade for its datacenters. These servers will launch initially with developers in mind to build and develop games in the cloud instead of local debug machines, and then to stream games to consumers.
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Microsoft's Next-Gen Xbox Will Focus On 'XCloud' Game Streaming More

Microsoft's Next-Gen Xbox Will Focus On 'XCloud' Game Streaming

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  • so what exactly is being streamed? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "low amount of local compute for handling tasks like controller input, image processing, and collision detection"
    I'm honestly more confused than anything

    • Let me clear that up for you (Score:4, Funny)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @07:11PM (#57003838)

      "low amount of local compute for handling tasks like controller input, image processing, and collision detection"

      You are probably wondering why they are doing collision detection on the box when they are streaming the game from the server...

      The answer of course is that the are doing the *game* collision detection on server and just streaming the video/audio; the local box collision detection is merely to detect when you kick the unit out of frustration and parks the cache hard drive briefly.

      • But it still doesn't make sense. So it does controller input locally, but it still has to send that input of the game in cloudzone, apply it there and then stream the results back? What's the point in doing any kind of processing on it before sending it on. I can only assume image processing is setting a resolution and if its anything like the local steaming you can do now that'll be low, med, high and maybe an option to show your network usage. Oh yeah, and good luck to anyone with a capped data plan, I'm

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fisted ( 2295862 )

          If you take the input, transmit it to the server, apply it there, update the game world and stream back the results, you'll see noticable latency.

          To hide such latency, games often run the game logic locally. It's not authoritative, but well..most of the time it works well enough. Console gamers already get a crappy experience so I don't expect people to complain.

          • If you take the input, transmit it to the server, apply it there, update the game world and stream back the results, you'll see noticable latency.

            To hide such latency, games often run the game logic locally. It's not authoritative, but well..most of the time it works well enough. Console gamers already get a crappy experience so I don't expect people to complain.

            I'm with you.

            Wasn't one of the main ideas behind PERSONAL computers that many small, local computers would actually be more powerful than one gigantic, hulking mainframe/clusterfuck?

            I mean, sending stuff like x/y/z coordinates of players and 'missles' seems a LOT more lightweight on the communication path and the multiplayer "management" servers, than does having everyone running zillions of Remote Desktop sessions on some Collossus SuperClusterFuck Datacenter.

            Or am I missing something?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think what is being streamed is less important than what we are losing which is control of our purchase.

      • I think what is being streamed is less important than what we are losing which is control of our purchase.

        If you're only just realizing that about consoles now then you're just ridiculously slow to catch on. I know there is the concept that because you paid money you must get something that you have control of but in this case it's about paying for a service rather than a product, alternatively PC gaming is still thriving and there's plenty of titles as well as the ability to actually produce your own.

        • More of the 1% trying to further establish their serfdom's. There is more money in renting than selling, especially if they can lock you in.
          • That depends on how much you use it. Sure if you're buying one movie every month it might be cheaper to do that than a Netflix subscription but I'd guess most people get more value from a Netflix subscription than they would if they were buying everything they watched.

    • Re:The money $$ (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wolfheart111 ( 2496796 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @07:16PM (#57003872)
      Subscriptions, a steady stream of it.

    • Translates to: it's time for me to stock up on more Xbox 360s

      • Re:so what exactly is being streamed? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @09:33PM (#57004418)

        Man I feel old saying this but...
        Remember a time when you could pack a gaming system away in a box for a decade or two and open it up and all the games still worked? You could sit in a couch and play with your friends. Only one copy of the game was needed.

        Then we had online multiplayer games where online multiplayer was either the real essence of the game or the only thing available. Your friends played at their own house but you could still talk to them. Everyone needed their own copy of the game. When the gaming company decided the game wasn't profitable anymore, they yanked the online servers so no more multiplayer, no more game. However you could still play your other games.

        Now what Microsoft is proposing is that the _entire console_ would be tied to the cloud. So when MS decides their console isn't profitable anymore (10-15 years from launch maybe?) then the whole thing becomes a doorstop and all the games you paid for are worthless. Don't bother packing it away in a box for the future.

        • Re:so what exactly is being streamed? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @02:56AM (#57005162)

          Man I feel old saying this but... Remember a time when you could pack a gaming system away in a box for a decade or two and open it up and all the games still worked? You could sit in a couch and play with your friends. Only one copy of the game was needed.

          How times change. I pulled out a second controller that hasn't been used in ages to get some 2p going on the bone the other day and it said controller needs updating. I was like what. the. fuck.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Whibla ( 210729 )

            Completely off-topic but, as another example of bizarre Microsoft behaviour:

            I was configuring a new laptop for my father the other day, one he'd bought with Windows 10. Obviously in order to download a new browser I had to fire up Edge, but the initial splash screen was annoying me so I changed the default start page to the 'blank page' option.

            On restarting Edge I'm presented with a 'blank page' containing a message along the lines of: "This page uses cookies etc. etc."

            I was like what. the. fuck.

          • Nothing like kicking back on the couch, turning on the ol' console and seeing that it wants to download GBs of updates, sighing and walking over to the PC. Waiting to load games off of DVD seemed a little lame back in the day, but waiting for them to install all 24 GB to the hard drive (before it then decides to check the internet for patches) really makes the thing a weird experience.

        • Man I feel old saying this but...
          Remember a time when you could pack a gaming system away in a box for a decade or two and open it up and all the games still worked?

          The average member of the species is computer illiterate, once people paid for mmo's and microtransactions it was game over for game ownership the average gamer is a fucking moron that will allow game companies to steal whatever isn't fucking nailed down.

  • A $500 purchase (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @07:09PM (#57003824)

    Followed by a $15 / mo subscription.

    People are being brought up into this new norm.

    • If most of the back end of this system is going to be loaded in the cloud... then why the fuck even bother having a console at all?? Just turn X-box live into a new Steam and be done with it.

      • If most of the back end of this system is going to be loaded in the cloud... then why the fuck even bother having a console at all??

        For the same reason Valve has the Steam Link extender.

        Just turn X-box live into a new Steam and be done with it.

        I imagine on average (median), the display connected to an Xbox One is much larger in inches or centimeters than the display connected to a PC running Steam. (Unfortunately, Steam Hardware & Software Survey data [steampowered.com] do not include the physical size of the primary monitor, only its pixel count.) People choose Xbox for the living-room-first experience, or because they don't own and/or don't want the upkeep burden of a gaming PC.

        • "For the same reason Valve has the Steam Link extender."

          Now see, one of those would actually be a good idea. Mickeysoft should drop the cloud gaming idea and repurpose their streaming console as a steam link equivalent for future Xbox consoles, and Windows 10 games. It wouldn't get ME to buy Windows 10 but I bet it would work on some people. If they've got some way to do enough of the processing on the streaming console, sufficient that one could stream a game from the living room console while someone was

      • DRM, and the ability to have a camera and microphone in the consumer's place for those oh, so sweet, analytic data.

    • I vote for the XNope.

    • Yeah no shit. The New World Order: You own NOTHING, only The Rich own things, you pay RENT on EVERYTHING, FOREVER. Don't fall for their bait, people.
  • This could make senses for multiplayer games that rely heavily on always online anyways, both creating a fair playing field graphics wise and hopefully making them impossible to hack. I would be concerned about ping causing some issues in how the game feels to the player however.

  • MS, learn a lesson from Square Enix (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @07:14PM (#57003860)

    They tried to "stream" a game, not only some sequences but having the game essentially run on their servers with the players' computers handling more or less just input and graphics rendering. What I'm talking about is the original Final Fantasy XIV (not the 2013 re-release but the original one in 2010). To say it was unplayable would be more praise than the result deserved. And we're talking about a fairly simple MMO here where delays are not quite so noticeable as in other games that depend highly on precisely timed input, where a key aspect of the game is that you feel in control.

    But it seems some kids have to touch the stove themselves to believe it.

    • To say it was unplayable would be more praise than the result deserved.

      And on the flip side games sent through OnLive were very much playable, just the company failed to monetise the service properly and went under.

      Incidentally what you're talking about is also a 10 year old game. And now that you just made me think of the internet connection I had 10 years ago I'm going to go curl up in the corner in the fetal position and cry.

  • Have these idiots not seen the steaming pile of laggy shit that is PSNow? It will work properly in New York and that's about it

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Xest ( 935314 )

      I've tried game streaming from my Xbox downstairs to my PC and even that doesn't work well. If they can't get game streaming working well over a 10gbps LAN I've no fucking idea how they think they can make it work well over the internet and half way across the world.

  • Netflix for video games even with download installed to an local fat client. Download caps with hurt it.
    With this caps are worse and people with slow networks are just cut off. Even people with unlimited FAP overnights can work with an download to an local fat client system.

    Also with no network neutrality isp can really slow things down and it's not just that your downloads take longer or when you stream that movie you have to wait a bit for the buffer. No it's lower the game down maybe 720p or lower and deal with poor lag / pings.

    • Much of the rest if not all of the rest of the first world don't have data caps. I've not been with an ISP which hasn't been unlimited data for almost two decades here in the UK.

  • My predictions:Launch title will be a driving game (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Any time cloud gaming systems are announced they need to come up with a way of hiding network lag, so they choose a driving game and never an FPS.

    Driving games have a lot of inertia; they don't have twitch controls, so they're the perfect candidate.

    Let's see what XCloud is demonstrated with!

    • I can play Overwatch at a Platinum level on my Xbox One over streaming. The latency is surprisingly palatable at 9-10ms. And latency is dropping and dropping. Cable used to be around 60ms a couple years ago, now it's 6-10ms.

      Many TVs have 10+ms of latency just in the video processor but that's getting better every year too. There's also Warp rendering where the GPU synthesizes a frame from a previous frame. It's being used for lowering latency of VR but it's something that could easily be baked into

  • Seems like we've been here before. Possibly more than once. It's never really flown well in the past, but maybe this time will be different?

    It does makes a lot of sense, for manufacturers and developers. If you take away all the hardware and turn the 'console' into basically a glorified VNC viewer... what's not to love about this?

    Modding your console system becomes moot. Piracy ends instantly. Hell, it's the last console you'll buy, since when the games need more processing power, they just move your game onto a better data center system.

    I'm surprised this hasn't happened much sooner. Let's just pray it sticks to games and console systems, and doesn't migrate into the general computing arena, cuz then they have us, by the balls. Forever. Alas, it already is honestly, one needs only point to Microsoft Office 365.

    Sarcasm aside.. this actually does make a hell of a lot of sense, from every angle. It will eventually lead to console systems just going away entirely and you 'subscribe' to your game console delivery service, and you 'play' with whatever device you happen to have.. laptop, desktop PC, smart TV, tablet, phone, endless possibilities for this technology.

    Of course, any network outage, burp or bump, and you are going to feel it, every time, every tiny hiccup gunna translate into sluggish response from the game, or complete momentary desync from your inputs to it's outputs. I imagine these are issues that those peddling the Thin Clients of the future will try to keep buried.

    Also, as a side note, this will in the long run, not be cheap. Initially, to hook people, they'll practically give these things away. But as the companies realize the maintenance and power costs for running all that back end for millions of people playing games... yeah, they're gunna need to charge a pretty hefty penny to make any kind of profit. Maybe they should abandon Thin Client.. as I said, we've tried it before and ... see any thin clients near you? That's what I thought.

    • Have you considered condensing your thoughts into a few sentences instead of posting in a lump of stream of consciousness text?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        One could get the impression that you think what you're proposing was actually trivial :D.

      • Have you considered condensing your thoughts into a few sentences instead of posting in a lump of stream of consciousness text?

        I consider a lot of things. But not that. Don't read it if you don't like the way I write? Downvote if it's that bad?

    • Microsoft Office 365 has full fat client + web mail. Not the same as gameing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      I do indeed - I'm using one. VDI infrastructure in larger corporates makes an awful lot of sense, and I'm happily using my VM stuck somewhere, connected to via a Wyse client. No perceptible latency. Even the streaming videos I watch on it work fine.

      That said, that's for standard PC productivity affair. Not sure how it would cope with a game, and also of course I'm using the internal LAN and not trying the public internet. Situation different, but just wanted to say thin clients are not only not dead, the
    • Thin client? Are you trying to Fat Shame me??
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • but hell no.

    Networks available to the consumer aren't quite where they need to be in terms of speed, availability and reliability ( heavy emphasis on the latter )
    to think streaming any game beyond a simple mobile style ( read that small size ) app is even an option.

    Net neutrality just got torpedoed. Guess who is going to have to pay the big bucks to ensure those game streams don't get put into the low priority que ?
    Some places have zero broadband options at all. Going to just tell those folks too fucking

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yep - it is a silicon valley myopia (although perhaps a Seattle myopia) that takes low latency high reliablity internet access for granted.

      • Yep - it is a silicon valley myopia (although perhaps a Seattle myopia) that takes low latency high reliablity internet access for granted.

        Isn't the internet is seattle really bad though?

      • Also high bandwidth is also a presumption. Not every can get 100+ Mbps pipes even if they wanted to pay for it.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Won't work in 'merica.... (Score:3)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @08:48PM (#57004278)
    Sorry, but our internet is REALLY bad here. Will work well in China and any other country that has actual competition and infrastructure. But here we have monopolies and still consider DSL an option.

    • When we moved over here from the US I was a little shocked at the state of the ISPs. We're stuck with au but have friends with similar problems through other providers:

      - Connections just randomly drop
      - Oversold back-hauls
      - 10 year DSL router with no firmware updates and no option to use a third-party modem/router
      - Using WiFi on the router is an up-charge (and it's only 802.11g)
      - DNS server will frequently return SERVFAIL (thankfully they don't block third-party servers)
      * Some major ISPs use enterprise NAT

    • Playing on some MMOs I run into players from Asia and Australia. They periodically have to drop out of the raid if we come across a boss that requires precise timing because they can't be sure a lag spike won't cause a raid wipe. Yes the US players also have to do that before players overseas already have higher than normal latency than US players. Any small lag adds to the problem.

  • your going to need another CAL for that, just don't get audited... RDP sucks so I am sure this will be worse. VMware PCoIP and Blast would work but MS will not license that. HP RGS would work too, but MS will not license that either. The queen says "Let them eat cake" and we accept this as good.

  • Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) <treboreel@live.com> on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @09:56PM (#57004482) Journal

    So in other words if you've got a shitty internet connection, you'll have a shitty console experience. Buy the hardware, lease the game, until they decide to stop supporting it AND pay for a net connection to support it all. Sounds like a cash cow for M$, and a cornholing for consumers. YEAH TEAM !!!

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2018 @01:49AM (#57005000)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • "If the future pans out the way Spencer sees it. In this scenario, there’s never really an Xbox Two. There’s just an Xbox One being upgraded over time like a PC, but with games developed on the Universal Windows Platform system, they would stay backward compatible despite new hardware. The software platform is separated from the hardware, allowing consoles to be upgraded without needing to move to an entire “next” generation of hardware."

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/i... [forbes.com]

    So Xbox One X

  • This is message I'm getting: "Hey, we know we screwed with the Xbox One in trying to destroy the used game market. Here's this new idea that doesn't have the exact same result. It will be rad, we swear!"
    • If they can make this work on a technical level then I certainly think there's a significant market for a Netflix-style monthly subscription where you can play any games in the library and in that scenario there is no concept of used games (just like there's no concept of used movies in the Netflix/Hulu/etc environment).

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