| Tmfwang said: So, I made a thread earlier about me wanting to see the ability to fully purchase PS Now games for endless streaming, and I got (as I thought) hammered down by comments of people saying its going to be too expensive and that "its never going to happen, even if Ps+ is made mandatory for it", and that made me think of a newly announced MS exclusive; Crackdown 3. C3 uses the cloud to get the power of over 20 (or so they say) xbox one's. Now, the only money MS gets to cover up the maintenance cost of servers is whats left of the 60$ people spend on buying the game. So, if that small amount (maybe around 10$) is enough to cover the maintenance cost of servers for over 20 Xbox One per user, wouldnt Sony be able to implement the ability to fully purchase games for endless streaming through their PS Now service if they made PS+ mandatory for it? Or is MS losing a lot of money by allowing cloud computing for C3? Thoughts?
Link to official endless streaming idea: http://share.blog.us.playstation.com/ideas/2015/05/24/ps-now-ability-to-fully-purchase-games/ |
Ok, my thoughts:
1.) Microsoft is the second biggest cloud provider; together with Amazon, Google and IBM they are the majority of the cloud computing market: https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/big-four-cloud-providers-are-leaving-rest-market-behind
Sony ain't even in the top 12 of cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Salesforce, Rackspace, Fujitsu, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, AT&T, HP, Alibaba): http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/cloud/300076702/pole-position-ranking-the-top-5-iaas-paas-and-private-cloud-providers.htm/pgno/0/6
So the Xbox-division will probably get much better deals on cloud computing than the PlayStation-division.
2.) Crackdown 3 uses the cloud features only in the online mode. PS Now games need a constant stream of the graphic data, no matter if the game is played online or offline. If the online mode gets less popular after a few months or years, the costs of the Crackdown 3 servers will fall.
3.) As long as the online mode of Crackdown 3 stays popular, the price of the game probably will stay above $20. XBL Gold is also needed for online, so that's additional revenue helping to pay for the servers. PS Now on the other hand doesn't need a PS+ subscription. Many of the PS Now games are older titles... most users won't be willing to pay $20 or more per game for "endless streaming" of these old titles.
4.) The use of cloud features of both services ain't really comparable. PS Now renders the game in normal quality and streams every pixel to the client, Crackdown computes physics data and post processing effects (which are much less data to transfer). So PS Now needs much less processing power but much more data traffic.
