The Xbox One vs PS4 console war has been pretty balanced with none of the two competitors throwing around any major punches. The sales are somehow close and the consumers are still largely undecided. Well, that was until the recent announcement of PlayStation Now. The Gakai-powered service was announced at CES 2014, and it seems like Sony has thrown the first punch. PlayStation Now allows the users to stream PS3 titles to their PS4’s and in the long run it will allow streaming to PS3, PS Vita, PS4 and some select Bravia television sets. It was a very impressive presentation by Sony and most people are already predicting that Sony has already won, as far as the console wars are concerned.
So far Microsoft has given a lot about their plans but very little on when they are planning to take off. The announcement of the Xbox One signaled how Microsoft was more eager to pursue cloud gaming power, they even went as far as making their latest gaming console disc drive-less. Microsoft are not the fastest in upgrading their services, but they place a lot of emphasis on quality and their Xbox live service proved to be a bigger hit than Sony’s PSN. The lack of backward compatibility has always been one of main cons of the Xbox one and the PS4. Sony managed to solve this issue through the PlayStation Now, but Microsoft is bound to introduce the same feature. In fact Microsoft members were seen playing Xbox 360’s Halo 3 on a Lumia and Xbox One during a company meeting.
According to Xbox’s incubation manager Jeff Henshaw, the Xbox One Cloud will give the gaming console storage and CPU equivalent of three other consoles. Critics have attacked this statement with claims that the consoles will be held back by latency and bandwidth issues because the average internet speed in the most develop countries only hits 8 Mbps. EA’s technology officer went further by claiming that the latest consoles “have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a -chip (soc) architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of console”. This shows that sooner or later the Xbox One and the PS4 will be able to overcome the minor issues that are holding back cloud gaming.
It has been common industry knowledge that Microsoft has been investing billions to improve their cloud infrastructure since 2009. They have set up data centers left and right and they are close to overthrowing Amazon as the number 1-cloud service providers. Furthermore ever since 2011 the company has invested more than $8.6 billion to develop and research into cloud services. And according to Bill Gates, there’s no stopping there, the company set up 25 data centers in 2013 and they have announced coverage for China, Australia and Japan. The beauty of this is that Xbox One’s will give developers the chance to access this growing Azure cloud platform.
In reality it is only Google and Microsoft that have a ‘cloud’. They are the only two companies that have enough data centers spread out across the globe to constitute a technical cloud. Microsoft also confirmed that all Xbox One games would have access to this $10 billion dollar investment while Sony is still dependent on a few dedicated servers mostly spread around the US. PlayStation Now can handle the demand that it is receiving at the moment because it is only available for US customers. In the long run the main difference will be that Sony’s cloud services allow you to play games that you don’t have on your console while the Xbox Cloud will enable you to play games at a better performance level than on any cloud.
Whatever Xbox is working on, it must be something big. The investment in upgrading their cloud services and the Xbox One in itself has certainly made Microsoft the most likely candidate to win the gaming console battle in the future, in the cloud that is. If Microsoft goes further ahead in their plans to run Xbox One Live on the Azure Cloud Platform, then cloud gaming’s future is bright indeed. Microsoft might be taking a beating at the moment, but I am certain that they will come back swinging in the months to come.
http://www.raptgamersunited.com/blog/the-xbox-one-cloud.html
