It would be more interesting if dedicated servers were a new concept.
Business Approach Comparison Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox
- Thread starter BRiT
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It would be more interesting if dedicated servers were a new concept.
My perspective was that I would use a quality solution regardless. If they package a quality solution I'd use that (but they won't, because good enough for most is $2), my free xbox headset has been in a drawer for 8 years.
The only issue I'd have with kinect as a solution is they need a dedicated mute button on the controller, because having to say it can defeat the purpose.
The interesting wasn't about the servers, it was about the new information that we didn't have before. MS _is_ charging developers for cloud access, which was presumed, but not known. And MS is charging enough less than competitors that a non-MS published developer was willing to make use of the infrastructure, which, judging from the proliferation of peer-to-peer games, is a significant shift.
I assumed MS wasn't charging devs at all since you need gold subscription to play online. I also question rationality of using AWS for hosting game servers, FWIW.
But my problem with your logic is that you cannot generalize Respawn's experience with MS since MS need Titanfall to promote XBox One.
Anyway, since cloud is not part of Xbox one hardware, Sony have a lot of streaming services, and there are popular, even AWS compatible free software solutions I find all this guessing game unnecessary waste of time.
Could the reason be for the cheaper pricing that the servers are mainly used for business during the work week and gaming happens at night and on the weekends? Essentially it would mean that Microsoft isn't giving subsidised access, but instead they are giving off-peak pricing.
Dedicated servers are not new. The way they can deploy dedicated servers (and other cloud applications) world-wide, and with automatic scaling, using Microsoft Azure seems to be new. Sounds like they are way more hands free. They basically just worry about writing the application, Microsoft does the deployment and support, and the cloud (Azure) handles the scaling on its own. They are massively subsidizing the price because they own the network. It could turn into a pretty large business for them if they can manage to get most of the PC and Xbox gaming business on board. For smaller devs that want to do online, this could be very enticing. Look at Capy Games' Below. It's supposed to be an online game with randomly generated dungeons. Pretty small company to be making an inherently online game. It's Microsoft or Xbox exclusive.
I'm sure the network is "oversubscribed" based on usage data, but they are also dumping tons of money into expanding their Azure data centers.
This part is not new. I have deployed eCommerce sites since 6-8 years ago using automatic scaling cloud services. We tracked our traffic usage and spawned new servers (with scripts or manually) based on the load.
They are inexpensive, but when you grow big enough, you'd want to host the servers yourselves using the same technologies. At that point, one usually set up open sourced or commercial software version of the EC2 cloud. Then copy the VM out of EC2, onto the new platform.
You should be able to google online games hosted on EC2 or other cloud providers rather easily. One of my earlier posts has some market data. In 2010, there were already 77 million users on cloud gaming (Facebook, Zynga and others).
I'm aware that the cloud could do these things for years.
Were there any games using dedicated servers for Xbox, PS3 that were doing this? I'm not aware of that. Were EA or Activision doing this? I know Naughty Dog was doing something with EC2.
Edit: Doesn't look like Naughty Dog was deploying dedicated servers in the cloud. They just did matchmaking on EC2.
I wouldn't be surprised if they already have parts of their server farm on cloud platform. e.g.,
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/naughty-dog/
MAG is supposed to sport a new, patented server architecture. At that time, they were still filing the patent, so there was no public info on it. I'm waiting~
Cloud is something born out of necessity. All server-based operations _will_ use it (or already using it).
You'll find the developers use cloud for assorted reasons. You are not restricted to using it just one way. This is why MS could only tell people you can use their cloud service for (any) latency insensitive tasks. ^_^
That NaughtyDog article was published August last year, which means they have already developed and deployed the service earlier. Would be interesting to see how TLoU has improved on the existing infrastructure.
At this point nothing shocks me with the xbone.
I thought it was presumed that xbl gold was paying for it.
Why would you assume that? Unless they raised the price of XBL Gold, why would the company give away most, if not all, of that money to the developers? I was always assuming that the cloud services were pay a you go, and priced right. There's probably a low level of service that you could get for free, but if you're going to be providing a full cloud hosted multiplayer solution, it would be crazy to think you'd just get all those resources, which cost a ton of money, for free.At this point nothing shocks me with the xbone.
I thought it was presumed that xbl gold was paying for it.
Why would they need to raise the price of gold? Given anything above P2P is charge to the developer, where is all this money going? a lot of people thought gold was paying for this.
It was reported by a lot of people that the cloud would end P2P gaming.
https://twitter.com/JamesStevenson/status/336955409187348482
that tweet is from: Community and Marketing Lead at @InsomniacGames
Just cannot make this stuff up... They really need to ust relaunch the console and just stop with the marketing buzz words. It doing wayyy more harm than good at this point.
What I wonder is how the pricing is handled. Is in it in percentage? I mean, if you develop the next flop which only sells about 10'000 times and gets played even less, it doesn't use as many resources as if you develop the next CoD hit with 10 million sales and potentially million users accessing the cloud services. Are the costs proportional to the amount of sales (usage) you have, plus a fixed cost at the beginning?
Same place Gold fees have always gone, straight into the coffers as pure profit. Why mess that up by actually using the money to pay for the service you're supposedly supplying when you can trick the publishers into paying you too? It occurred to me last night that the whole Cloud thing is sure starting to sound like MS want to make publishers just as dependent on paying for multiplayer as the users already are. That's a pretty neat trick, selling the same thing twice to two parties.
At this point nothing shocks me with the xbone.
I thought it was presumed that xbl gold was paying for it.
Well as long as its less costly for the dev to use MS's infrastucture than go to the competitor or do it themselves, its a win situation
At least it seems with Gold now you'll be getting dedicated servers, where Sony will just pocket your PSN plus $?
I mean the double standards in play here are mind-boggling
Sony are providing 'free' games and network infrastructure for that PSN fee. That's their official line on why they have made PSN+ necessary for online gaming, anyhow.
http://www.vg247.com/2013/06/17/ps4-gara-explains-new-ps-plus-subs-cross-game-chat-more/
)
http://www.vg247.com/2013/06/17/ps4-gara-explains-new-ps-plus-subs-cross-game-chat-more/
So part subsidising hardware, part online network (part profits
)At least it seems with Gold now you'll be getting dedicated servers, where Sony will just pocket your PSN plus $?
I mean the double standards in play here are mind-boggling
I thought that's also only with PS3. Isn't PS4 online multiplayer going to cost? If it is - I too would be interested to know if we'll get dedicated servers (for that cost).
