The Face of Xbox. Will it change?

[Pemalite]

selnor1983 said:

Hmmmm. Interesting. That means Microsoft are opening Xbox Live up to Windows 7. As Titanfall can only be played with Xbox Live. As it is now built entirely around Xbox Live Cloud. PC and 360 as well as The One.

Good move for Microsoft.

You already replied to that message, you haven't replied to my other one about game counts.

However, I don't know why you keep bringing up the cloud and Xbox Live...
Titanfall isn't using Xbox Live on the PC, at all, it's using Origin.

Now the problem I see is you are putting Microsofts "Azure" in conjunction with "Xbox Live" and then thinking Xbox Live is somehow on the PC, that couldn't be farther from the truth, Azure is platform agnostic, you could run it on a Sega Dreamcast, it's not a service for the Xbox it's a service for the Xbox, PC, Windows Phone, basically *all* of Microsoft's products can use it. (Even stuff not owned by Microsoft, for example Sony could rent some rack space.)

Xbox Live is a platform, like Steam, Microsoft tried that and fell on it's face, it was called Games for Windows Live! And every sane PC gamer disliked it, I doubt they will relaunch it after they decided to shut down everything.

In the end though, the PC is so stupidly powerfull that cloud based computing isn't even required it's probably a couple of generations ahead of the Xbox One and Playstation 4 in terms of CPU performance thus it's just DRM in the end.

selnor1983 said:

 Steam doesnt have Cloud, and if Titanfall shows itself to be a game changer with Cloud then Xbox Live could have many titles not possible on Steam. Even 3rd parties like Respawn not just first parties.

Do you even know what the "Cloud" is?

It's a collection of servers that handles processing tasks that is typically done on a host machine which is then streamed to the client.

If anything, Steam is actually superior to that of Xbox Live, the Steam network isn't controlled by any single entity.
Internet providers all around the world set-up Steam servers near their content delivery networks, which is an optimal approach as those servers will usually be in area's where the internet provider has high concentrations of customers.

Now the kicker to this is you get far lower latencies and higher bandwidth the internet provider gets to save lots of money as grabbing content right off their own networks is far cheaper than grabbing data of Akami which is what Microsoft uses to distribute data.

You can have as many servers in the world, but it ain't going to help if they're half a planet/continent away, games are actually fairly latency sensitive.

Now as for server based processing any company can set that up and make deals with internet providers to provide such capability, but it's a pretty pointless affair on the PC.