I think it may have been mentioned before, but even if latency wasn't an issue the costs of this tech for widespread applications across a bunch of games are not going to be viable as a business, unless you can get each player to pay a monthly fee for it or a big one off yearly one, extra alongside their XBL Gold Membership or some all inclusive service that includes both XBLG and Cloud Compute.
MS are not just going to give this away for free, for a game that won't make them any money and even if said game does net GTAV like profits it's still not cost effective to not have some supplemented payment by customers.
Think about if each user requires 20X the power of XB1, then they have to pay for the implementation and maintenance of that piece of hardware, alongside Microsoft's bandwidth costs.
Even buying bulk amounts of processors/RAM and reducing costs down per unit for all of that tech it's still going to cost Microsoft at least a few times the price of an XB1 at retail.
Being conservative say $900 per user for the hardware demands of that one person, over the life of their usage.
Now scale that up to all of the players that could play Crackdown 3 online, even if only 100K people play at any one time $90,000,000 for the hardware alone for that one game, 100K is consistent, average usage, not peak or lowest and that's only for those 100K average users playing Crackdown 3.
Then add other games, say over the rest of XB1's life Microsoft adds a dozen or so other 1st party games that use the tech, all placing similar demands on the tech, that increases the usage 12X+ higher $1,080,000,000.
Any 3rd party games that use it will have similar demands or perhaps even great if more people use it or the features required increase per game session.
Microsoft would have to claw back at least a few billion dollars just to break even.
Say we're conservative and we say it's $2B, divided over a few million gamers, they'd have to pay back about a thousand dollars over the life of their console, say the rest of the generation lasts 5 years, that's $200 per year, per user.
Most people aren't happy with the costs of XBL Gold or similar services and this is without Microsoft adding anything to generate a profit off of it.
You can't even say "well the game's going to make a profit from copies sold", because that goes to the developers and Microsoft for the costs of developing the standard game.
Cloud usage is a separate venture.
Any additional users would be required to pay for their own cost of usage.
Even if Microsoft only operated on thin margins of say 10%, it's only going to net them $200M for a massive gamble.
If MS adds a small margin like that then it adds to the negative appeal of this whole thing.
Would you be willing to pay $220 a year for 5 years, with no price reductions to use this?
Maybe MS can sell it as a Monthly Subscription service, charge $20 a month per person and say, "for $20 a month you get 20X the power of XBox One at your finger tips", which would be massive marketing spin, because it's not guaranteed to work 100% perfect 100% of the time.
MS could of course add in other features like additional free games, movie and music streaming, data storage, it's going to have to be sold as a thing for more than just cloud processing assist tech for use in games.
Although any additions eat into profit.
TBH cloud assist makes more sense if it adds a fraction of the boost we're talking about it here, because maybe Microsoft can get away with charging less, they could add say a few dollars per month to XBL memberships and then give users one or 2 XB1's in the cloud, more users would share the costs, which brings pricing down for each individual.
It's still going to be a huge gamble from a business perspective, but it's a smaller one.
People assuming that every XB1 user can have access to 20X the power of XB1 for free whenever they want are going to be sorely disappointed and if you think every game can use that at once then well you're living in a dream world.
For that you'd have to take the costs a multiply it a whole bunch.
Not even remotely likely to be feasible, even for Microsoft and their deep pockets.
