| Machiavellian said: So what you are saying is thats all a company has to do is rent thousands of servers around the world to simulate what would be required to support a game with this tech. In order to have quality of service for anyone playing your cloud based game, you would need servers everywhere you sell your game. Hmmm sounds expensive to me. Cheaper than owning, running and maintaining these servers. Also what you are saying that you only need is a client server setup and thats it. You do not need a development platform that makes it easy for a developer to have a multi-thread hosted instance where sending multiple streams of data from individual clients machines, replicate those streams or split the data so that you can use mutliple servers to process the data, sync that data to the multiple client machines and send the completed stream back to the client. So such a setup is something game developers can spin up or any company can just spin up in months if they decide to go down this route. They can indeed, it's not as difficult as you seem to want to believe it is, the servers themselves act only as a job scheduler, they receive and transmit completed computational jobs either in tandem or in batch, it HAS to be this way otherwise you would be hardcoding specific tasks to specific servers and that would make each server single purpose, increasing the operating costs exponentially. nobody goes down this route of bothering to do so however simply because the framework is not there for it to be a viable solution (internet access, speed and stability is too big of a variable to bank on it being there). I believe you are underestimating the work and investment needed to setup such an infrastructure. MS already spent 3 years doing it and they still not totally ready to go to market. Not sure why you believe this is something that can be done in a shorter time frame. MS werent the first to do it, its been attempted multiple times before, abandoned or shelved just as many times, each time the operating costs outweigh the usefulness because the simple truth is that the variable of speed, bandwidth, latency and network availability cannot be relied upon enough for it to be a primary feature of a commercial product, as such the only thing that can be done is the storage and modification of cloud stored data as per forza 5. Cloud computation is possible, for any device, regardless of the time and money you spend on the technology however, it pales in comparison to the very real situation of it not being worthwhile in its current form. I believe you overestimate Microsofts ability to deliver a product that is limited in both functionality and usability by factors microsoft cannot control. |
I guess in the end the difference stems from being a licensed developer for the past decade and being an armchair enthusiast.
