Microsoft rumored to be buying...... [2020-04, 2020-07, 2020-11]

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liams said:
Paradox is the only? PC only game publisher that I know of (could be wrong on that of course)
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Nope, Paradox release some of their games on consoles (this is a relatively new thing) and have long supported the Mac and made their games easier to run on linux.
 
DSoup said:
Nope, Paradox release some of their games on consoles (this is a relatively new thing) and have long supported the Mac and made their games easier to run on linux.
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fair enough about the console versions, I wasnt aware of that.

I don't think Microsoft would stop any of the Mac versions or the linux versions either so that wouldn't be an issue. They specifically worked with parallels to get the age of empires series working on Mac better (albient on virtualised windows running on a Mac, but they didn't have to do that)
 
liams said:
I don't think Microsoft would stop any of the Mac versions or the linux versions either so that wouldn't be an issue. They specifically worked with parallels to get the age of empires series working on Mac better (albient on virtualised windows running on a Mac, but they didn't have to do that)
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I'm sure Microsoft would keep the Mac versions of existing games going but I have low expectations of release new games on non-Microsoft platforms. They can do that now and they don't, it's not worth their effort. It's in their interest for people who game on Mac to buy a Windows licence.
 
Not to mention any possible issues from Apple switching the architecture of their products, that may cause more headaches for game-devs or at the very least its specific headaches not shared on other platforms.
 
BRiT said:
Not to mention any possible issues from Apple switching the architecture of their products, that may cause more headaches for game-devs or at the very least its specific headaches not shared on other platforms.
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What headaches? If devs don't want to recompile for ARM, M1-based Macs just run 80x86/x64 code and people are reporting games like Stellaris run better in translation mode faster than on real 80x86.

This is not Apple's first CPU jump rodeo! 680x0 to PowerPC then PowerPC to Intel 80x86, now Intel 80x86 to Apple ARM. They've had some practice! ;-) Kind insane they went CISC -> RISC -> CISC -> RISC.
 
DSoup said:
What headaches?
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Headaches as in trying to optimize for a platform that doesn't leverage developer experience from PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series, or PC with its overlap of CPU and GPU behavior.
 
BRiT said:
Headaches as in trying to optimize for a platform that doesn't leverage developer experience from PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series, or PC with its overlap of CPU and GPU behavior.
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From their dev diaries, Stellaris does not get much of platform-specific optimisations. Their engine is already cross-platform so their optimisation efforts are the algorithms the engine runs to simulate the universe. This then wreaps benefits across all versions. On the desktop versions of games (Windows, Mac) they don't optimise for specific configurations of CPUs - you get what the compiler throws out. The basic engine simulation, for example, does not benefit any more than six cores on the dekstop.

I read a worrying amount of their dev diaries!! :yes:
 
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BRiT said:
Not to mention any possible issues from Apple switching the architecture of their products, that may cause more headaches for game-devs or at the very least its specific headaches not shared on other platforms.
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they could just stream the games to Mac thinking about it
 
ChuckeRearmed said:
I believe it might be a future for a lot of machines. Similar to Stadia basically. MS is just behind in server coverage and server blades
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They're not behind in server coverage, certainly Azure isn't. MS has more data centers in more places than anyone else. And xCloud has the same number of regions as Stadia, but they have South Korea, which is apparently doing very well for them, and Stadia doesn't. And while they haven't ramped up their server blades as much as they could have because they're transistioning to Series X hardware, and that transistion will likely be slowed by component shortages, I don't think they've got any particular shortage there atm.

Of course, MS does not, currently, have anything lined up to allow the streaming of PC games though. That may change, but there's been no announcement of anything around it. So while streaming is a solution for playing console games on a Mac, it wouldn't work for playing Paradox games that aren't ported to Xbox first. And as yet there's no mouse and keyboard support for xCloud. So that would also need to be addressed.

I do think Paradox would be a good buy for them though, if they want to grow their PC offerings. So would Sega.
 
Eolirin said:
They're not behind in server coverage, certainly Azure isn't. MS has more data centers in more places than anyone else. And xCloud has the same number of regions as Stadia, but they have South Korea, which is apparently doing very well for them, and Stadia doesn't. And while they haven't ramped up their server blades as much as they could have because they're transistioning to Series X hardware, and that transistion will likely be slowed by component shortages, I don't think they've got any particular shortage there atm.

Of course, MS does not, currently, have anything lined up to allow the streaming of PC games though. That may change, but there's been no announcement of anything around it. So while streaming is a solution for playing console games on a Mac, it wouldn't work for playing Paradox games that aren't ported to Xbox first. And as yet there's no mouse and keyboard support for xCloud. So that would also need to be addressed.

I do think Paradox would be a good buy for them though, if they want to grow their PC offerings. So would Sega.
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they have most of the ground work laid for streaming pc games, any game made using their GDK can run on both xbox and PC, with the game detecting what platform its on and displaying the appropriate UI features for each platform. Theres no reason the pc game couldnt run on an xbox blade somewhere, but just use the PC UI to the streamed client. Im sure the mouse and keyboard support will come when xcloud is officially released for PC with a desktop client
 
liams said:
they have most of the ground work laid for streaming pc games, any game made using their GDK can run on both xbox and PC, with the game detecting what platform its on and displaying the appropriate UI features for each platform. Theres no reason the pc game couldnt run on an xbox blade somewhere, but just use the PC UI to the streamed client. Im sure the mouse and keyboard support will come when xcloud is officially released for PC with a desktop client
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But GDK requires the game to use it and I presume a lot of games - old and new - don't use it all.

Eolirin said:
They're not behind in server coverage, certainly Azure isn't. MS has more data centers in more places than anyone else. And xCloud has the same number of regions as Stadia, but they have South Korea, which is apparently doing very well for them, and Stadia doesn't. And while they haven't ramped up their server blades as much as they could have because they're transistioning to Series X hardware, and that transistion will likely be slowed by component shortages, I don't think they've got any particular shortage there atm..
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I heard that people - like in central part of USA - has Stadia working better than XCloud. Ok, probably old server blades contribute to that but not necessarily.
 
ChuckeRearmed said:
But GDK requires the game to use it and I presume a lot of games - old and new - don't use it all.


I heard that people - like in central part of USA - has Stadia working better than XCloud. Ok, probably old server blades contribute to that but not necessarily.
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good point on the old games, just had a quick look and it seems that xbox can run MSIX packages, you can package existing programs into an MSIX package so maybe thats how they could support old games running on an xbox.

I suppose for the less resource intensive games they could just straight up run the games on windows (thats running on an xbox)
 
ChuckeRearmed said:
But GDK requires the game to use it and I presume a lot of games - old and new - don't use it all.


I heard that people - like in central part of USA - has Stadia working better than XCloud. Ok, probably old server blades contribute to that but not necessarily.
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It would make sense for stadia to have better support currently as it launched Nov 2019 while xcloud launched Sept of 2020

I think you will see a steady increase on capacity and quality of the streams for Xcloud as we transition from sprint to summer in the states

employees just got access to the browser version of xcloud so that will hit sometime in the future also
 
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