So, how have you been enjoying The Power of the Cloud ?

[Madword]

selnor1983 said:

deskpro2k3 said:

Sony has filed a patent called "Suspending State of Cloud-based Legacy Applications," which allows one to add new content into an emulated game without having to rework the game's code.

The patent's abstract provides a detailed summary as to exactly what this might mean for the future of Sony's cloud-based platform. Warning: it is a bit of a mouthful.

A snapshot of an emulated game may be generated by a snapshot generator. At some point during the emulation of the emulated game, a snapshot generator delivers a suspension request to an emulator. Once the suspension request is received, the emulator will suspend the emulated title. The emulator generates a snapshot of the emulated game by recording the current state of all devices being emulated. The snapshot is then delivered to the snapshot generator. It is emphasized that this abstract is provided to comply with the rules requiring an abstract that will allow a searcher or other reader to quickly ascertain the subject matter of the technical disclosure. It is submitted with the understanding that it will not be used to interpret or limit the scope or meaning of the claims.

So what does this mean? Well for one, this could allow Sony to rework some of its older titles and deliver fresh, slightly tweaked experiences of its legacy library via Gaikai. That said, companies file patents all the time, many of which are never fully realized. As such, we'll just have to wait and see if this materializes into anything at all.

[Via NeoGAF]

So not Cloud Processing then. This is much more like Ouya. Streaming the game to PS4. So PS4 is not processing anything at all. Streaming it as a video file. This is exactly what Gaikai is. A steaming service. Its not a processing server.

Yes Gaikai is different to cloud processing. It's a streaming service, but I think if they work it out right, it probably could be used for local emulation of games. As for the streaming part... I dont see this being used for Ps4 games and maybe not even PS3 games.. It will be fine for PS2/PS1 games due to the low resolution requirements. 

As for MS's cloud, it wont help in the most part for making games any more interesting (real time this and that), unless it's an MMO and guess what, every company that does an MMO uses the cloud and can do what MS can do. MS's benefit is having lots of servers to service massive numbers of users, so in theory they should have less downtime than other online games.

As for open world games such as Fallout4 etc.. there is no way they will spend millions on a single player game that has access to these features on a console that will only sell half the number of games. i.e say fallout sells 10 million copies and 5 million is on PS4, why bother with OTT complex cloud features for the XBOX One only. Trust me when i say that they wont, not unless they are paid to do so by MS.

So in terms of major benefit, the only games that *might* use it are MS exclusives and only if MS decide to pump the money in. Considering they havent even supported Kinect2 with much effort yet, I cannot see them pumping lots (and i mean lots) of cash into this.

Unfortunately most people misunderstand the benefits of the cloud right now, it's been around in many forms for over 10 years, and on the whole the internet is the problem - its too slow. Matchmaking, server stability and automatic bandwidth handling will be the key benefits to their service, you can forget cloud processing right now.