cloud gaming, another excuse for a company to control the customer

Then the Sim City launch went and made it even cooler

Was Sim City using cloud gaming?  I just thought it was a DRM?

oh so NOW it's a certainty. So we should wait for e3 but MS's cloud is a certainty. Gaikai should just pack its bags then. There was a reason gaikai sold for 320 million and Sony didn't buy it for no reason so like xbox fans are saying to wait for e3 I'll say lets wait for everything to pan out. The ps4 is still atm the more powerful and more prospective gaming console.

Sorry to bust your bubble here but that would mean it would have to have a constant internet connection, and a fast one with that. Any hiccup and your retail bought game becomes unplayable.

Just to clarify cloud based gaming can work, and system based game what we have now works, but not a combination of both. Latency alone would mean any optimisation on a game based on the Xbox One's specs becomes impossible.

Why on earth would I care about always online?

Now that I think about it lets do some maths. So the xbox is 10x the 360 and with the cloud 40x. That means with the cloud the xbox 720 will be 4x more powerful than w/out the cloud which is about the specs of an nvidia titan gpu. So know MS is saying that they will be able to support a potentially 20-50Million + gamers with "Cloud Processing" economically? XBOX GO HOME!

PS: BenV Cloud Processing will mean a forced always online. And who says YOU have to care. America's avg. internet speed is 7.5 mbits/s so it's not a feasable task yet. Maybe in 5-10 years the ONE can get the capabilities while new console with another 8-10 times the power come out.

They say cloud... Basically, you could play 1 city offline, but it used the cloud to calculate all the regional stuff even if it was a private server. I am sure Microsoft won't have the same load issues, but it still does make people a little concerned

Of course the main problem is the latency that nobody seems to have been able to solve, especially if you are trying to stream something which looks better than next-gen.

Basically, it could be a good thing, but I certainly don't want to it become a requirement for any game any time soon.

MS is building 300, 000 servers for Xbox One at launch. They can handle it

Here's what you need to know about cloud computing and games.

1. Cloud Computing will never be viable for gaming.
2. Hybrid local/cloud computing can be viable do. Key word being "can" as there are no real-life scenarios to use an example. It's all just wishful thinking at this point.
3. Even if Cloud Computing in whatever form makes its way to console games, American internet connections vary wildy from state to state. For example the average internet connection speed in Delaware is 10.88Mbps while the average in Delaware is only 3.74Mbps.

Using OnLive as an example, it requires a minimum of 2Mbps connection. That's actually much improved over the last few years, but considering this would only get you a resolution of 1024x526, its not suitable for HDTV gaming. The recommended connection speed is 5Mbps(sorry Delaware) and that will only bump up the resolution to 1280x720.

The point is that cloud technology in regards to gaming won't be viable for a long time, if ever this generation. Bragging about fantasy scenarios is amusing.