You're right, there will be some that will not like it but if you look at Diablo 3, a game that could easily have featured an offline mode, and the success it have I don't think the reaction will be so bad.
And if you look at it the other way. Why would I not be able to profit from better/more feature of a game because a minority of gamers are not willing/able to play it online.

The desperation among some people here... I am not knowledgeable about these matters at all but I take MS word over anyone else any day since they have been working on this for years and have far superior technical competence within their company. They have been championing th concept of cloud computing for years so they are obviously on to something.

If this will require more games to always require an internet connection, what matter does it make?? The console community can't seriously be so far behind the PC community when it comes to these matters. If this can give us more impressive games on all manner of consoles, aren't we all happy about it?

@Bold:  I would think the question you raise is dependant on the service.  If people have confidense that MS servers have a high avaliability then those questions probably will not be something that holds a game like Crackdown back.  As services goes, XBL has been pretty rock solid for the life of the 360 even the original Xbox.

In the end, Its hard for me to make a real distinction between a game like Destiny and Crackdown.  All the question you raise is the same for that game but i do not see people bringing up the same issues.  Destiny can be played in a group or by yourself and I am sure there are a few people who want to play it that way.

diablo 3 is a great example actually, it sold well indeed but at the same time much of the complaining came from the online-only aspect.

in the end it all comes down to what sells.   the excitement or protest of the cloud processing enbabled games is what will determine it's fate.

So what happens in this game if for some reason I cannot connect to the internet? While I dont believe the cloud has any real affect on the consoles ability to process building destruction, id still rather not have my game be lacking features while playing single player.

You do realize that the demo they showed was connected over a local network right? And there's still latency. The cloud is not realistic at this point. And not to mention, think that a game's gameplay will be like the CG trailer makes no sense.

it will certainly have an impact but if a games looks good or is from a well appreciated franchise, cloud processing or not the game will, more likely, sell well just like the Diablo 3 case (even though Diablo 3 wasn't that good in the beginning IMO).

There are tens (hundreds maybe) of thousands of enthusiasts and engineers out there with computers more powerful than the Azure servers, and nobody has proven that remote interactive physics is feasible over the internet.

And if it's not interactive (iow : pre-rendered events), what's the point? That data could just as easily be stored on a disc. For the destruction to be unique it has to sync up with your game and be immediately variable. With pre-rendered events there really isn't much limit (other than what your GPU can draw of course).

Also, it's now halfway through 2014, we're talking hypotheticals about a 2016 title, and yet there are no true proof of concept demos? Hell, with the ID@Xbox and other smaller-dev companies supposedly having free Azure access, it would be cake for them to do a small test out there to show what they're talking about.

I'll tell you what they're talking about : stuff that's barely feasible on local gbit lan with stupidly high resource usage.

A Physx hardware card requires a fair amount of bandwidth to run for crap's sake :

http://physxinfo.com/news/880/dedicated-physx-gpu-perfomance-dependence-on-pci-e-bandwidth/

We're talking about bottlenecking happening even at the PCI-E 2.0 X1 level (500 MEGABYTES/SECOND EACH WAY). And that's with near-zero latency. I don't have to tell you that an internet connection is at best common case 10-20x slower (8 Megabit = 1 Megabyte, so a 500 MB/sec internet would be labeled as 4000 Mbit! With a ping of .1ms lol.

Keep believing PR spin and all the silly buzzwords you want, but remember, every corporation in tech has been known to have this craptalk through the ages. If you believed everyone, we would have realtime ray-tracing a decade+ ago in realtime consumer gaming graphics and all kinds of other silly stuff.

Even Intel, the kinds of processors, had promised all kinds of amazing stuff with a project called Larrabee, and that went into the ether.

I'm not saying that the R&D and lessons learned along the way won't be useful integrations along the way, but this story : 'Cloud physics will allow much more advanced local interactive destruction effects/etc' is just not feasible on so many levels that it boggles the mind. That ANYone believes it is stunning. It's a thousand times more ambitious than streaming a game over the internet, and I don't even believe that's a great idea overall anyway.

As a matter of fact, it would be WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY easier by far for MS to just host a cloud of enhanced Xbox consoles online, and stream the entire game in that manner. Everything would be synchronous, and it would even work with 1080P/60fps :D (being silly there, but you get the point).

And you know what? It would probably be about equal economically.

1)Just like the Playstation Now demo Sony showed us earlier this year. Was there so much people telling Sony were lying???

2) Cloud processessing is use with things that could run async so latency should not be and issue. An explosion could be calculated at the moment you throw a grenade or lauch a rocket so at the moment of the explosion you will already have the data to process it.

Think about it this way: the worst latency scenario someone can experience withcloud processing is the best case scenario he may hope with a service like Playstation Now. Because PS now is totaly dependant of latency, cloud processing isn't.

3) Games will not look nor play different than they do right now.