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

[Madword]

Dark_Feanor said:

Madword said:

Yes indeed any company *could* purchase access to the cloud, but the question would be *why* you would want to for a single player game. They will not... and yes definately Sony could build their own, us MS's or use google/amazon. It's just not practical for anything other than a online experience (MMO).

I don't think online processing is ready for at least another 10 years, maybe more. So i don't think Sony is hamstringing it in any shape or form. In fact it might be a combination of streaming/processing that is the future... but not in the next 10 years... and not for gaming at the level MS was talking about (30x power or whatever it was).

It doesnt matter how many servers you have and how fast those servers go, you are always restricted by the speed of the pipe going to and from those servers. With crazy bad interenet in various locations.. it's just too much of a hassle.

I do think in the far future, gaming will become more of a service because it will cut out the piracy issues.. but for processing etc... not this gen.

You are right, price is the single most important factor for this tech... for any tech.

However you have to consider that the price for "cloudbase" processing is falling realy fast. It´s falling faster than the Moore´s Law, this days.

It´s harder and harder every day to put more transistors into a silicon dice, but there are plenty of room to build server farms, only problem then is energy price and telecom infrastructure.

Yeah I would imagine infrastructure, staff and energy are massive cost drains for this kind of tech. Which I think is fine in normal business services. But games companies on the whole are running some seriously tight budgets... there are very few AAA big companies left and the middle ground is dying fast... so the cost has to be very effective. Of course ongoing costs is another issue, game is successful to begin with, but who wants to keep paying yearly costs for it, this means switching off games... crikey even Sony/EA do this to keep costs down, the rest of the gaming industry are not going to be renting out servers for long periods of time for mildy successful games.

So that again leads me to the same conclusion, that it will be of limited benefit to all but the biggest games with the most money behind them, and those will be MP or games with significant MP parts to their games. No point doing this for Single player games, or games that have small MP connectivty. So the major benefit will be with MS exclusives, and if they don't support it within the next couple of years (as in new gaming functionality and not MP based functionality), I think we can all agree that it was mainly PR guff.