Crackdown 3 [XO, XPA]

[Billy Idol]

Who pays for the additional compute power? Monthly fees additionally to Gold? Do we know about this already? Seems to be super expensive for a game dev, especially in the early days of the game when lots of people play and try to get the servers down by doing all crazy things

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Who pays for the additional compute power? Monthly fees additionally to Gold? Do we know about this already? Seems to be super expensive for a game dev, especially in the early days of the game when lots of people play and try to get the servers down by doing all crazy things

Back from 2013....

Our intent was to enable developers to take advantage of server resources in their games without having to deal with the challenges that come with building, managing and running servers at scale. So, we chose to provide cloud features that allow the game creators to push the limits of their gameplay experiences and apply the bulk of their investments to game creation, rather than server and operational resources. In fact, we even give them the cloud computing power for FREE so they can more easily transition to building games on Xbox One for the cloud.

It was a big part of the "original" vision for the XB1, which of course, necessarily became limited when the consoles were no longer mandated to be 'always online'. Hopefully, we'll see more developers use it and get better experiences as MS continues to retreat back to their original vision and the console becomes more and more reliant on its online capabilities.

http://news.xbox.com/2013/10/xbox-one-cloud

 

[Scott_Arm]

Who pays for the additional compute power? Monthly fees additionally to Gold? Do we know about this already? Seems to be super expensive for a game dev, especially in the early days of the game when lots of people play and try to get the servers down by doing all crazy things

It's a Microsoft exclusive, so Microsoft is probably footing that bill. It's running on their platform. There's no way they'll charge an additional fee for this game.

 

[AzBat]

IGN has a nice 17-minute behind closed door gameplay demo. It's off screen footage, but the guy from IGN gets to take control of the Agent for some multiplayer building destruction. He does it at about 12 minutes into the video...

Tommy McClain

 

[rokkerkory]

Mighty impressive

 

[eastmen]

What I'm hopeful is the API and SDK's created from this can be leveraged by other developers.

It's hard to think of a gametype that I enjoy playing that wouldn't immensely benefit from this tech.

I'd love to see a proper Fable using this tech.

 

[Scott_Arm]

The game is running on Unreal Engine 4.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Right now, I'm so F-ing pissed off that the XBO doesn't require an online connection. If it did, the cloud based physics destruction would be available for single player as well as online multiplayer. /sigh. I don't want to have to play multiplayer in order to experience it.

Saw this coming way back when the idiots on the internet made MS backtrack on that. Oh well, maybe the next generation of consoles. Or maybe they'll eventually release a PC version that requires online for single player.

Pardon any inflammatory comments in the above, but I'm so royally pissed. Maybe I should have waited until I cooled down before posting.

Regards,
SB

 

[Scott_Arm]

Right now, I'm so F-ing pissed off that the XBO doesn't require an online connection. If it did, the cloud based physics destruction would be available for single player as well as online multiplayer. /sigh. I don't want to have to play multiplayer in order to experience it.

Saw this coming way back when the idiots on the internet made MS backtrack on that. Oh well, maybe the next generation of consoles. Or maybe they'll eventually release a PC version that requires online for single player.

Pardon any inflammatory comments in the above, but I'm so royally pissed. Maybe I should have waited until I cooled down before posting.

Regards,
SB

I disagree. The limiting factor in providing these resources to a single client for a single-player experience are probably financial, more than anything. I think going forward as the cost of providing the resources drops, it will become more viable for a single-player experience.

 

[Rurouni]

Even if X1 is an online console only, I don't think any devs is stupid enough to make a single player experience limited by online connection quality, especially not if the dev expect the game to sell a lot. Being an online console only is one thing, being online console with a strict minimum speed and latency is another thing.
Of course there is the financial issue like Scott have said. In multi, the same calculation from the server is shared with the clients. In single player, each player basically reserving CPU time on the server, so it wouldn't be cheap to maintain, and I'm not sure you want to pay for the server time each time you want to play the game. The argument here probably since you already a gold member, thus MS should already reserve CPU time for you.
I don't know how much usually a server time 20x the X1 CPU cost, but probably not enough to be covered with $50/year subscription.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

I disagree. The limiting factor in providing these resources to a single client for a single-player experience are probably financial, more than anything. I think going forward as the cost of providing the resources drops, it will become more viable for a single-player experience.

I doubt it, if you believe any of MS's original vision and anything they said, they were fully prepared to offer up Azure to any developer creating games for the XB1 because the entire plan was to leverage that computational power to make up for the fact that they weren't creating a loss-leader with cutting technology.

The problem with applying this specific implementation in SP is clear - narratives, checkpoints, etc... You can't have 100% fully destructible environments in SP story-based campaigns, because you'll just destroy something before you complete the objective.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Of course there is the financial issue like Scott have said. In multi, the same calculation from the server is shared with the clients. In single player, each player basically reserving CPU time on the server, so it wouldn't be cheap to maintain, and I'm not sure you want to pay for the server time each time you want to play the game. The argument here probably since you already a gold member, thus MS should already reserve CPU time for you.
I don't know how much usually a server time 20x the X1 CPU cost, but probably not enough to be covered with $50/year subscription.

Nah, that's bogus. First, there wouldn't be enough 3rd party developers that would make use of it in order to really hurt MS's bottom line because they want their games cross-platform. Second, MS has been making money on each console since Day 1 because they (like Sony) decided to put three year old tech in them. So for the first party games that would take advantage and the few 3rd parties that might also take advantage, the financial loss to MS wouldn't be greater than had they actually done what was done previously... sell $1000 hardware for $500 (making those numbers up, but you get my point).

And all this talk (most of it entirely legit) of the PS4 being more powerful than the XB1 would make people laugh if there were more games out there that allowed totally different experiences due to leveraging Azure on the XB1 while the PS4 can only use its hardware internals. Which would sell more consoles, which MS profits from.

I don't think it has anything at all to do with financials, it has to do with MS backtracking from their vision and thus preventing developers from relying on the always connected console and utilizing Azure. Silent has every reason to be pissed, just as I am. Only, I'm not as pissed, because I see that it's very clear that MS is slowly retreating back towards that original vision. So we are still going to get there. At the end of this console generation, I firmly believe the XB1's that are on sale will be online only, with no BR drive and the majority of games will require an online component even if you have one of the older consoles with the BR.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Even if X1 is an online console only, I don't think any devs is stupid enough to make a single player experience limited by online connection quality, especially not if the dev expect the game to sell a lot. Being an online console only is one thing, being online console with a strict minimum speed and latency is another thing.
Of course there is the financial issue like Scott have said. In multi, the same calculation from the server is shared with the clients. In single player, each player basically reserving CPU time on the server, so it wouldn't be cheap to maintain, and I'm not sure you want to pay for the server time each time you want to play the game. The argument here probably since you already a gold member, thus MS should already reserve CPU time for you.
I don't know how much usually a server time 20x the X1 CPU cost, but probably not enough to be covered with $50/year subscription.

The cost is impossible to understand, because it's microsoft and they're using their own cloud resources to service the game. The real cost to them is the hardware the network capacity to handle x number of clients. But since it's cloud, those resources can be used for anything. The same hardware and network that runs your game session could run a web server, if they need it to. The cost of renting those resources internally to Microsoft is probably very odd. They don't need to take a cut of your Live subscription and pay it to anyone, and if they did it would be money paid internally into Microsoft's cloud division. For a multi-platform non-Microsoft Studios game, it would be a different story.

As for being stupid to make a single player experience limited by online connection quality, I totally disagree. Sure, you lose some people, but the market of people with good Internet connections is still massive. Multiplayer games are huge, and they're all affected by connection quality. People will deal with it for a good game experience.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

The cost is impossible to understand, because it's microsoft and they're using their own cloud resources to service the game. The real cost to them is the hardware the network capacity to handle x number of clients. But since it's cloud, those resources can be used for anything. The same hardware and network that runs your game session could run a web server, if they need it to. The cost of renting those resources internally to Microsoft is probably very odd. They don't need to take a cut of your Live subscription and pay it to anyone, and if they did it would be money paid internally into Microsoft's cloud division. For a multi-platform non-Microsoft Studios game, it would be a different story..

And to add to this, since Scott either has blocked my messages from showing up (honestly can't blame him if he did) or just ignores my posts and then posts essentially the same comments afterwards without acknowledging agreement with my previous posts, MS has already invested significant resources in Azure because you need to already have spun up those servers and capacity before the clients come to you and want to use them.

I'll bet Azure has significant server resources that are going unused at the current time because they've built it with the capacity for potential future demand. Just like Amazon is selling their cloud services to other third parties because they've done the same thing. People think Amazon is about selling books.. oh no.. now they're about selling anything that can be shipped... oh no.. now they're about even delivering groceries.. what Amazon is really about is their cloud services because in order to make their business model work they had to create those resources and they've realized they've created a larger capacity than they need, so now they sell that capacity.

MS actually created Azure not only out of their own need, but actually with the business goal of selling the extra capacity. Giving small amounts of it away for free so that developers can integrate those resources into their XB1 games is a total win-win situation.

That's why I don't think there's any financial considerations regarding using Azure for game developers. And the article I quoted and linked from 2013 makes it clear that MS is making these resources available to developers for free.

 

[Rurouni]

Yes, it is extremely stupid, especially in my country. I just leave it at that because I believe we have discussed about this before.

Anyway, the cost is real and if SP always need cloud power, then it will cost them a lot, probably more than your typical MP games in terms of computing power cost. If MP support for old games is abandoned (which surely only cost those publisher/devs very little), then cloud power could be dropped sooner because it's more expensive to run them. MS got an advantage where they are also using their own server to support it and I definitely don't know how much it would cost MS to support a game that needs cloud computing power, but I would imagine guaranteeing what MS told us in the beginning of this cloud thing (20x power for each X1) is very costly. If my calculation is correct, for 10mil X1, that means 84Gflops (14Gflops/core X 6) x 20 x 10mil = 16.8 ExaFlops of computing power must be reserved. Of course right now X1 isn't an online console only and only Crackdown 3 that will use lost of cloud computing, and that for MP only. Imagine if it is enabled for single player and moving forwards, a lot of games harness cloud power like Crackdown. It really won't be cheap to support it, especially expensive if it's only for single player even for a company as big as MS. I think I never heard about a cloud service that use as much computing power as in Crackdown 3 for a massive amount of single client (at least 1 mil), especially not with the combined bandwidth and latency needs.
Maybe someone with a better understanding (and more data!) can give a clearer picture on how the end numbers would look like if cloud computing that is used on Crackdown being applied to single player. Like how many simultaneous user usually plays on X1 at peak time for all games (for assuming the worst where all games using cloud computing) and for the most played game. Also how current cloud service CPU utilization outside of games? Do they count by time? Speed? Something else? How much Azure total computing power? Amazon?
Maybe it needs it's own thread... Or probably need to move this post to the cloud thread?

 

[Scott_Arm]

And to add to this, since Scott either has blocked my messages from showing up (honestly can't blame him if he did) or just ignores my posts and then posts essentially the same comments afterwards without acknowledging agreement with my previous posts, MS has already invested significant resources in Azure because you need to already have spun up those servers and capacity before the clients come to you and want to use them.

I'll bet Azure has significant server resources that are going unused at the current time because they've built it with the capacity for potential future demand. Just like Amazon is selling their cloud services to other third parties because they've done the same thing. People think Amazon is about selling books.. oh no.. now they're about selling anything that can be shipped... oh no.. now they're about even delivering groceries.. what Amazon is really about is their cloud services because in order to make their business model work they had to create those resources and they've realized they've created a larger capacity than they need, so now they sell that capacity.

MS actually created Azure not only out of their own need, but actually with the business goal of selling the extra capacity. Giving small amounts of it away for free so that developers can integrate those resources into their XB1 games is a total win-win situation.

That's why I don't think there's any financial considerations regarding using Azure for game developers. And the article I quoted and linked from 2013 makes it clear that MS is making these resources available to developers for free.

Don't have you blocked. The only disagreement I have is that there are financial reasons to want to limit the amount of "free" resources they're giving out for games. It costs Microsoft a fortune to build these data centers and they need to make as much of it available for revenue as possible. They can probably one give away so much for internal projects like Crackdown. The floodgates are not open on free Azure resources, and they probably won't be. This game is probably considered a marketing strategy for cloud powered gaming. Show that it works so that others will pay for the resources to use it in their games.

 

[AzBat]

Sorry to over simplify this, but why can't they go the World of Warcraft payment model & make the game free, but charge a monthly service fee to be able to have complete physics/destruction across single player & multiplayer. I understand why they don't do it on this project. It's the proof of concept game to show off cloud could work in a game like Scott_Arm said. Am I disappointed or upset about it? A little bit, but I'll get over it. I still get to play a next-gen Crackdown.

Tommy McClain

 

[Scott_Arm]

@Rurouni Ignore the marketing speak. They're not really doing 20 times the computing power of the Xbox One. They're doing up to 20 times the amount of processing time that's typically available for physics, which is a small fraction of the total box.

Also, Microsoft Azure has over a million physical servers worldwide. It's roughly similar in capacity to Amazon and Google. Adding up the total processing power is an exercise in futility.

Edit: This story pegs Azure as being absolutely massive. There's no way to really add up how much computational power is available world wide. http://arstechnica.com/information-...-loves-linux-as-it-makes-azure-bigger-better/

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Sorry to over simplify this, but why can't they go the World of Warcraft payment model & make the game free, but charge a monthly service fee to be able to have complete physics/destruction across single player & multiplayer. I understand why they don't do it on this project. It's the proof of concept game to show off cloud could work in a game like Scott_Arm said. Am I disappointed or upset about it? A little bit, but I'll get over it. I still get to play a next-gen Crackdown.

Tommy McClain

That's the right way to go about it. If there are running costs, you need to recoup them somehow. However, subscriptions are something of a turn off. WOW, the poster child for massive revenues, sees subs that keep dropping. F2P seems to show the 'way forwards' for the monetisation of ongoing titles. Give people optional in game purchases on top of the initial purchase price and keep generating revenues. Cloud based MP could have plenty of paywall features as an added revenue.

 

[Rurouni]

Also I don't know if this is or the cloud thread is the place to ask, but if someone blow up a building and that using 20x the physics computation... of course on a MP game we are going to have several simultaneous people blowing up stuff, thus a lot of cloud power need to be harnessed? what about the bandwidth? Again, I haven't read all the details, but you need 2mbps for I assume the worst situation? as in several people blowing up building at the same time?
I think it would be fun to stress test Crackdown 3 cloud power.