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Machiavellian on 21 January 2014
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BenVTrigger said:
g911turbo said:
BenVTrigger said:
The Cloud is MS PR speak. That is all.

Not that it really matters the X1 is still awesome but the "Cloud" was invented as a means of convincing consumers to go fully digital. So yes if people think there will be a real world power difference due to the cloud they will be sorely disappointed


"The cloud" is NOT a MS term.  It's used everywhere if you're in the semiconductor business.  It simply is a marketing buzzword, but at the end of the day using remote servers to store, compute, etc. is not a new idea nor is it going away.  Its only getting bigger.  Even your Gmail account uses cloud storage.

Definitely potential in the future.  Thing is, EVERYONE is doing it.  It's not exclusive to MS, but they ARE dumping a lot of money into it.

Im aware of this but MS version of the cloud is just PR speak.

Its just dedicated servers. Thats it. Still very nice and can streamline some aspects of games but not this huge power source MS was pretending it was.


Actually MS version is not PR speak.  MS has actually put the money and built the infrastructure to deliver could processing to their game console.  The Orleans development platform is the infrastructure MS has built for cloud processing which took them about 3 years to complete.  Yes there isn't any games created using this platform but the new Halo is rumored to be the first.  I believe we will see more titles attempt to use MS cloud compute after Halo release or we might see more with other internal studios projects.

As far as other cloud based services, MS is bringing all of their cloud services to the X1 not just the cloud processing.  As you mentioned, MS is giving developers free dedicated servers.  The reason you see developers use that first because its very easy to implement and it probably was ready during most developers timeline when they started their projects.

During MS presentation where they stated the cloud could provide 4X the processing power of an X1 was PR speak but not all of it was off base.  Depending on the game and how offline processing is used, this statement is not incorrect but right now its not demostrated outside of the one off demos.