Has consumer pressure ruined gaming for the next decade? *spawn

Yes it "pre-excludes" people but it's not a publisher decision at that point, they know what the market is and they can't directly change it. This changes the publishers decision making process when deciding what features can be shipped.

The sticker on the game box is also less attractive to publishers because it leads to support issues when people don't see it and buy the game anyway.

 

How do you relate these business choices with cross-platform titles? If XB1 maintained its always on, and publishers were looking at supporting one always on console and one not always on console, and PC, how do they deal with the excluded market, or the compromises, and how is that any different now that XB1 is exactly in the same boat as PS4?

Seems to me it makes no difference. The only people affected are makers of platform exclusives, who can still target the cloud because MS wants to promote it as a differentiator. For everyone else, either they'd avoid the cloud because PS4+PC doesn't have it, making XB1's always online an 'inconvenience' for those offline games, or they'll make their games cloud-dependent anyway (The Division) and put a requirement icon on the packaging.

 

The difference between PS4 and XB1 would certainly limit the use by 3rd parties doing cross platform titles, though I think you'd still see some use it, even if only as the checkbox platform exclusive feature.

And as I've said before if I were MS I'd be happy to sell azure time for PS4 or PC titles if publishers wanted to pay for it, on PC I'd even provide a compatible API, but that's a strategic decision, which very much depends on what you view the real long term platform to be.

In the end it is what it is, I was more irritated with not being able to install a disk and throw it away.

 

My money is on Capy just using this cloud indistinguishably from what we consider dedicated servers, multiplayer connectivity, or just plain account storage.

Funny thing is, I think there are still plenty, and I mean plenty, of experiences that will never need an online connection waiting to be made. Having connectivity and cloud is a buzz word, it has real-world benefits, but those benefits are not suddenly intrinsic to creating good games.

Just look at some of the big hits this last generation, you'll see just as many games that were successful just by their single-player cloud-less incarnations as there are multiplayer.

The past decades of gaming has shown this, and they've also shown the dangers of pushing too much connectivity in the wrong ways. (Diablo 3)

So all that talk from the OP about how the gaming community gets ruined is silly. And just because some mythical gaming tech utopia isn't achieved by the MS technocracy. Games will be made regardless, and this generation will be a big transition into the full switch to online only.

I think the switch to digital only is coming, but a 5-10 year transition period probably works better. And if it's still an issue, there's always the PC, and always the console online stores to download from.

 

What's the point of comparing it to games from a generation where the technology could not be fully embraced because a publisher couldn't confidently know that all of it's target market could use it?

Looking at multiplayer games before Xbox basically made online standard for Xbox Gold. Look at the state of video games before 3D acceleration became relatively standard. This is most easily scene in PC gaming when 3D acceleration was relatively new. Good luck finding many games that were 3D accelerated until quite a few years after the first proficient consumer level 3D accelerator was released (3dfx Voodoo Graphics along with Rendition Verite). It was still relatively rare when Nvidia finally jumped in with a more standard 3D accelerator in the Riva series.

Look at the adoption of 256 color graphics in PC games before the majority of PC's contained 256 color graphics? Want to get one of those fancy games greenlight by a publisher or developer? Good luck trying to make that happen.

Of course, there's little evidence of how much things can change before there's a critical mass of machines/users that can make use of those things. Just look at how long it's taking for 64 bit games on PC as well as Dx11 native games on PC to take off. This despite there being a good 64 bit OS being released back in 2009 and the first Dx11 cards back in 2009 as well.

Basically until it is a standard, universal, or nearly universal technology or piece of hardware, it will not get enough universal adoption to drive gaming forward.

Hell look at how environmental audio was flourishing when Creative Labs made EAX 1.0 and 2.0 open license and thus having wide adoption even on motherboards with onboard audio. Then look what happened to it when they made it closed license for EAX 3.0-5.0, meaning publishers could no longer rely on nearly all PC users having access to EAX.

The consoles have an advantage over PCs in moving game changing technology forward in that whenever there is a new generation, a console manufacturer can guarantee publishers that ALL of its consoles will support X features. That gets technology advanced to that level relatively quickly assuming it is available on ALL machines. That does not happen with optional things...ever. At least in the history of console gaming.

If it isn't available on ALL machines from that console maker then good luck getting games greenlit to use them. Lightgun games, Move games, PS Eye games, etc. Kinect support in games would have eventually died off as well if MS didn't make it standard for every single Xbox One. If they had made it optional as was Kinect 1.0. I can virtually guarantee that it would have failed miserably this generation due to lack of support from publishers due to it being an optional accessory. That despite it being technologically quite impressive and allowing for gameplay that would not exist without it.

Hopefully things change and we'll see widespread adoption and experimentation with online compute, but I'm with Joker in thinking that by making it optional on all consoles, we've now stuck our heads in the sand and relegated most of the wonderful possibilities that are possible to the next generation of consoles after this. Assuming that there is a next generation of consoles after this.

Regards,
SB

 

Sure, for third party titles I'd expect a low adoption rate, but for MS I'd expect a few tech demos at the very least to entice both developers and consumers. However, there are none. Like I said, they designed the thing to be always online from the beginning so they should have worked on that from the beginning too. If that's the case and they have nothing to show for, it seems to me like it's just vaporware.

Yeah but multiplayer games, even multiplayer-only games have shown to be quite profitable so I don't see why publishers would be against the idea of using the cloud extensively. I'm not talking about lots of games, just one. It seems more plausible to me that there's simply no good use for it just yet.

 

There was the 300,000 asteroid orbits tech demo? Versus 40,000 possible on the console alone. Supposedly tracked at "~500,000 updates per second".

There hasn't been a shortage of suggestions from various developers.

 

This is all true; but there is one factor you missed out. It wasn't the creation of the standards on their own that drove the mass adoption. It was the technology itself reaching a mature enough standard to be effective and available to the mass market. And then it was developers like ID who started the ball rolling with regards to how that tech was pushed. The platform holders did nothing but implement, and in some cases extend, it.

It's just the same now, the only difference being a platform holder is simultaneously creating the tech, implementing the tech, and trying to mass market the tech. All of which could have transpired had they not proved themselves to be the most ham fisted handlers of such an idea. Whether it would work is another matter.

When it's all mature, ubiquitous to every device, and second nature then it all will make sense. But it's not just a question of tech, but the very infrastructure to run it. Imagine marketing your 3D card to a market where only 4 in 10 PC's were capable of running it 80% of the time.

 

We have not really gained anything from CDs/Blu-rays other than FMV and better sounds/voice acting.

 

Compared to what? Champions of Norrath was 9GB on PS2, and that was on one single dual layer DVD, and mostly due to a type of megatexture technology creating nice varied levels (much better imho than even Diablo 3). Wouldn't really have been possible on a Nintendo cartridge - heck it wasn't possible even on the 360 on one disc.

Even the choice for DVD in the 360 has held back some games but harddrives have solved that issue at least to some extent. A surprising amount of 360 even first party exclusives comes on two discs, of which content of one is then typically installed to the HDD.

Seriously, there's probably more than a DVD's worth of textures just in one of the latter Uncharted games, so I'm not sure what you mean with your comment.

 

Yes, we have more storage so we can put more stuff (textures, sounds and movies) in the games. It is not like you have to think about that, it is completely obvious.

 

...and better textures and models and more variety.

No more obvious that FMV and better sounds/voice acting

 

I must have missed it. Do you have a link?

I don't know, just look at Ubi showing Watch_Dogs and The Division way ahead of time. Other companies would have copied them already. But the thing is that in order to do so they have to gauge consumer response. Mostly in the form of sales. No matter how cool a feature, devs/publishers wouldn't jump in without some hard data first so I don't think that's actually the case here.

And the problem with that is that all they ended up was a lot of PR talk and nothing to show-off.

Yes but I don't think the MP has been stagnant due to the lack of the cloud. Just developers and publishers playing it safe to make more money.

 

It was discussed in the cloud augmentation thread. MS showed a demo of 40,000 spinning pink dots running on the local machine, and then 300,000 pink dots when they connected to the cloud, simulating NASA asteroid data. Apart from a couple of large figures, there were no details, and nothing could be learned from the demo.

 

ON a related note :
B3d member Moozoo made a OpenCL Solar System Simulation if anyone wants to try it
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=63555

it does 594,688 bodies

 

Well you know where MS support of OpenCL is................

 

It isn't about what the cloud can do that a local machine can't do. It's about the limitation of resources that a game programed to only run on a local machine has to deal with.

You have a finite amount of resources with which to do everything in a game. Hence why you see things like advanced sound algorithms get virtually no resources dedicated to it. Hence why non-combat AI and even to an extent combat AI gets so few resources dedicated to it.

Potentially with the cloud you now have X amount of extra resources that are completely and totally unavailable on a local machine. Sure the local machine could still do those things, but only at the expense of reducing the resources used for other things. Perhaps it's only 10% more computational power. 20%. 30%. Whatever it is, it is still more than what you have with the local machine alone.

That goes way above and beyond what exists with most online enabled games currently. It represents a potential paradigm shift in how you code a game and what things you can now enable that you couldn't before due to being limited to the resources available on the local machine.

The local machine is always going to be the best at rendering graphics and immediate latency sensitive physics. So the more stuff you can move off the machine means more resources you can dedicated locally to those things. If you move X% of latency insensitive calculations online, that's potentially X% more local resources that could be used for better physics for example.

There's also the potential to draw in realtime relevant data in game from the cloud or online resources or whatever you want to call them that an always online connection would allow. Things like having your game reflect the real world time, day, weather, traffic, etc. conditions. Or having a living constantly changing and updating world.

Regards,
SB