The Xbone

[Phopojijo]

Still, fucking congrats to Microsoft for taking the feedback and knocking the DRM away.

The DRM is not removed, it is just re-parametrized. Undid their less-restrictive sharing permissions, redid their disk-based authentication.

Weakening DRM would be like if Steam did their sharing thing WITHOUT compromising anything with their offline mode, etc.

"Removing" (never adding) DRM is something like CD Projekt does, launching The Witcher 3 DRM-free on GoG (which, admittedly, is a bigggg advertisement for their service).

[Arteen]

Unconfirmed rumors, but...

The "family sharing plan" was just glorified game demos. Haha, what shit.

[Zeph]

I will admit that I was not happy with how some of my fellow colleagues handled explaining the systems and many times pulled my hair out as I felt I could have done a better job explaining and selling the ideas to the press and public at large.

I know it's unconfirmed but this is so ironic it has to be true.

[Warsaw]

But that's almost always how it goes with marketing...

[ODX]

Yeah Microsoft did a fantastically shitty job of revealing and explaining all the features they have, because it really would turn the tides considerably and shove the PS4 into the dust.

For examble, this is why Titanfall isn't on the PS4 but is on the XOne:
http://www.respawn.com/news/lets-tal...ox-live-cloud/

Essentially, this Cloud is turning out to be amazing. Developers have so much versatility when it comes to them, since the servers can be used for a dedicated server, cloud computing, or probably tons more little nifty things I'm sure we have yet to find.

[Btcc22]

Reads more like an Azure marketing piece than a genuine explanation of why it's not on the PS4.

Hundreds of thousands of servers, sure, I'll believe that.

[Warsaw]

To be fair, the Xbone has potentially more processing horsepower at its disposal with Microsoft's new XBL cloud. Less intense or less time-sensitive tasks can be offloaded to the cloud so the local hardware can focus on the more demanding bits. Theoretically, this should have allowed them to save on the per-unit cost of the console itself. At $450, the Xbone would become much more palatable relative to the PS4.

[Btcc22]

To be fair, the Xbone has potentially more processing horsepower at its disposal with Microsoft's new XBL cloud.

Yeah, I've read people saying this but really, what's it going to offload to The Cloud™? You can't do anything that's latency sensitive (so nothing real-time), anything critical to the single player game or anything that's going to use much bandwidth.

At this point I don't see it as anything but a marketing gimmick to try to downplay the PS4's hardware advantage. Expect to see completely mundane features that we've had for years now only being possible thanks to Azure.

[Warsaw]

I said potential. Right now, it's not practical to offload heavy, time-sensitive stuff. That will change in the future as broadband gets better. What you can stream at this very moment, however, would be the level geometry itself. Textures can get processed on the box since that's what you really see, while the mesh can be calculated remotely. Perhaps skyboxes, or NPC interactions. How about storing all of the markers that are necessary to maintain a large, persistent world? Heck, Microsoft may not even know everything that they can do with the servers and Azure yet, it's there partly so developers can explore this new resource.

And the PS4 does not have that much of a hardware advantage. It just doesn't. Yes, it has more stream processors, but the GDDR5 advantage is made up for by software tomfoolery on the Xbone. I really don't think multi-platform games are going to look any better on the PS4 than they do on the Xbone.

[Kornman00]

Hey, you guys remember playing H2X/H2V on Live?

The cloud. Yet another out-of-band service that will break forced functionality when the next gen is phased out. I wonder if developers have to pay monthly fees for the Azure bullshit as well (meaning if the studio or support goes under, so does the cloud).

You know what else runs on Azure? H4. Hopefully the shit service with H4 was just a learning phase.

The Cloud: because developers don't get any sunlight, why should their software?

Okay, that's enough cloud turbulence for one morning.

I lied. You know what other over hyped, mystical idea exists "in the cloud"? "Heaven".