So Crackdown 3's Building Destruction was already shown months ago. The Cloud for Xbox One is real.

[Arkaign]

I can explain the Build Demo quite easily : they didn't show us anything at all in terms of how they connected the units. For all we know they ran 10Gbe or a direct-bus connection between the systems to handle the bandwidth involved. It was also quite sluggish with a poor framerate even so.

If they really wanted to impress people, they would have said "here we are logging on to our Microsoft data center in South Africa, and watch how our client can manipulate this physics test!". But they didn't even go so far as running a test across town.

I don't have to tell you that even Gbit lan, good old lowly Gbit, is an order of magnitude quicker than any average home ISP in the 1.5 to 50mbit range. Even 'Mbit' is deceptive, because the hops are mind boggling sometimes, and neither the ISP nor Microsoft can completely control all the various hardware in between the client and server. Run a tracert on a few of your favorite sites and enjoy watching the various layers tell you how 20th century our global network truly is.

In closing, I have no problem with people keeping the faith that this is somehow going to work in a way that's relevant in the near future. I also have complete faith in the facts that this is unfeasible on a variety of levels so overwhelming that it's almost comedic to entertain. I've seen COUNTLESS promises from a huge variety of tech companies over the years that proved to exist either only for R&D/patent progress that will eventually be repurposed/sold elsewhere, and/or was to be a PR puff piece to attempt to boost their image or their stock price, to raise investor confidence. This smells 1000% of that, particularly when you match it up with the fact that Microsoft has been beaten to hell and back for having irrefutably second-rate hardware that launched at a higher price. They DESPERATELY need a win in the 'tech/specs' PR campaign in their minds. Whereas in my minds they're better off keeping their eye on the real aspects that they CAN control that will help : a great message and a great library of titles. If heaven and earth part and they DO get the impossible cloud physics model working in the real world with real people with real crappy internet, then that would be that much more impressive than touting something that they can't even demo in an open and believable manner.

If they had a demo that could work on XB1, they KNOW how much that would impress people and get good word of mouth. All they would have to do is put it on the XB store. But they can't, they won't, and almost certainly this will never work in this gen.