It still being a prototype and the current market heavily favoring physical media for games makes it pretty unlikely we will see a properly functioning version of this for several years. Likely won't appear on the X1 at all, assuming we don't end up with an overly extended gen again.

A better GPU would be a much easier solution and would save millions of R&D costs. But why take the easy road, it's TEH FUTUREZZZ!

I don't know, I still don't buy all that powah of ze cloud stuff, sorry.

Moderated,

-Mr Khan

Of course. Games sell far more physical copies on consoles than they do digital. Hence "heavily favoring physical media".

Until a stable streaming service arrives or games suddenly becomes a lot smaller, it's likely going to stay favored towards physical copies for several more years. Pricing also needs to improve.

PC is the only place we've seen it swing heavily towards digital, but that's largely thanks to the convenience of downloading on a PC and the great services available for it both is quality and pricing (aka steam :p).

It is quite foreseeable where "this" everything is going. It ain't coming today so why judge it in such a limited manner? Once they put multiplayer behind the paywall... look at it now.

The difference is, that Gaikai/Onlive processes everything inside the render farm and sends a video stream to the user, the users device sends back the control inputs.

The system used here is supposed to handle individual tasks in a game, like lighting or physics, while the rest is handled by the machine at home. Synching up these tasks with what is processed at home sounds quite hard, as in a 30fps game the frame has to be ready after 33.3ms and in a 60fps game after 16.6ms, as many users are on an internet connection that fluctuates between 20-100ms.

If people with an internet connection get a better experience than those without on a single-player game, something is very wrong.

2 frames per second.

That's a great punishment for those that chose not to connect their Xbox One to the internet!

So how much are the subscription costs ? They ain't gonna give away computational power for free ...

Impressive but it's a prototype in a controlled environment and right now internet infrastructure in many places would likely prove difficult to use it effectively. I'm gonna take a guess and say we're about 10 years off from cloud computing really being worth anything the likes of which were claimed last year.