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.

While I agree marketing got a hold of it, its not so black and white.  Besides, marketing ALWAYS does that... its what they do for ANY company (do we really need to talk about Toy Story graphics for PS2, etc.).

Supposedly Titanfall is running some scripts on the server side for NPCs.  Its a start, and I applaud developers for looking into it.  Again, this is NOTHING exclusive to MS.

Another example of cloud most people don't know about is Siri/Google Now.  It doesn't use a whole lot of local processing power.  Locally, it converts your voice to text.  Then, it sends this over the network to "cloud" servers that process the contextual meaning of the text.  Hence why you need a data connection to use it.  Making sense of speech patterns etc. takes a much faster processor than the first Siri equipped phones had.

Granted, Siri is a serial order of operation, vs. parallel.  So timing was not that critical.  But the point is, cloud computing will become more prominent moving forward before it becomes less so.

You probably use the cloud every day and do not know it.  The cloud and cloud processing is already proven.  Cloud processing within a game is not.  People need to understand that there are many different cloud services and cloud processing is just one of them.  MS is bringing all of their cloud services to the X1 including their other existing platforms.

People keep saying Sony and Nintendo can just replicate MS cloud servicess, but its not that simple. There is a huge cost associated with bringing such services to a platform. It's like people saying MS can just replicate Playstation Now because they already have a cloud based solution in Azure.  Building the infrastructure for any of those services cost millions and doing it right takes experience.

On the contrary to the marketing buzzwords, there are some serious differences between the implementation of the cloud vs the cell.

* Cell has a certain existence. It is INSIDE every single PS3 sold, and developers can always use it 100% of the time. Cloud exists only when connected online, and to what extent relies on the connection latency and bandwidth. This has 3 implications:
- The cloud can only / mostly be used with online elements
- The cloud can never replace the "core" components of a game, but merely peripherals.
- The cloud can only replace CPU-intensive but latency-tolerant and bandwidth-paperweight applications.

* This all means, the cloud can only enhance the capabilities of XB1 CPU, under very specific and limited circumstances, which are not vital to the game. It will technically have no influence on the graphics except that it may take some load off of the GPU (reverse GPGPU in a sense) but this is hardly ever applicable.

* The best we can expect from the cloud is enhanced Physics and AI under certain scenarios. This is all great but because it is NOT VISUAL, nobody will be blown away by it. And because it is not easily perceptible, nobody will, knowingly, buy the console on this premise of "better physics or AI under certain circumstances". It's a very hard sell.

* The last but not the least, is its implementation. Very few developers do utilize it, and we will hardly ever see any third party developer using it. So only a handful first and second party titles will utilize.

Now the point comes down to this:
* The cloud processing power is something that will only enhance the physics and AI under certain circumstances in some rare games, all of which is obviously not easy to perceive (in contrast to clearly visible and perceivable differences from Cell, which are more often used, not to mention the clearly superior PS4 performance, utilized one way or another by most firms).

Oh my god. The Cell "underdelivered"? Not really.

It was complex for "third party" developers to utilise (remember Bobby Kotick of Activision threatening to pull support for PlayStation 3) but once they got their heads around it they began supporting it like there was no tomorrow. Lol.

The Cloud is all talk from Microsoft. We haven't seen a shred of proof of "how" it's use is actually to the benefit of developers etc.

P.S. I'm a newcomer so don't bite my head off. : P

But I'm with you, many might have respected MS a lot more if they just came out and said, "this generation we plan to invest a lot more money in our server network, for storage, computing, etc. We feel this is a integral part of the evolution of gaming." (and to be fair they kind of did)...

Problem is, marketing knows that a majority of people are not computer savvy. Marketing starts using the term cloud excessively, and making promises that might still be 5+ years out, etc. That's what marketing does. They are in charge of people's perception at any cost. Try watching the news sometimes (Today show, etc.)... some cringe worth descriptions of technology on there. Why? So people can grasp it, understand it, appreciate it, and then buy the product lol

There is no Cloud power. What MS cloud can do is what every other company's cloud system can do - store data and stream small information.
In terms of performance it's a gimmick. Raw power comes from the console's hardware.

Nothing can be done to make games run 1080p or have better graphics. Those things depend solely on the hardware.

US has bad internet anyways, so unless you have 1ms ping and 1000Mbps there won't be anything to show off for Xbone.

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.