Microsoft and Xbox announce Project xCloud

[ZacoAttaco]

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-announces-project-xcloud-xbox-game-streaming-for-myriad-devices/

Microsoft Blog Post: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-gaming-with-you-at-the-center/

Video Link: 

Microsoft has officially announced their forthcoming streaming platform, titled: Project CloudX. The following excerpts are from Ars Technica:

Quote

A new service from Microsoft called Project Xcloud is on the way, and it will stream Xbox games, not just to consoles and PCs, but to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Microsoft shared new information about its plans in a blog post and a talking-heads YouTube video.

 

Microsoft is testing the service right now. Multiple control methods will be offered on mobile phones and tablets...Games shown in early footage of the service include Sea of Thieves and entries in the Gears of War and Halo series. However, Xcloud will not be limited to first-party titles; the plan is to implement the service in such a way that no additional work will be required to support it from third-party developers. Microsoft hopes to achieve this in part by running the games on what amounts to native Xbox hardware in its data centers. "We've architected a new customizable blade that can host the component parts of multiple Xbox One consoles," Microsoft wrote in its announcement. "We will scale those custom blades in datacenters across Azure regions over time."

They also mention they intend to utilise 5G capabilities even though the technology is in it's infancy, as well as standard broadband and 4G technologies.

Quote

The goal is to make game streaming possible not just on broadband Internet in homes or upcoming 5G networks but on today's 4G networks as well—that's key, since many regions won't see 5G for a while, and some of the non-core users Microsoft is trying to reach rely exclusively on mobile for Internet access.

In their video they mentioned that they have it running small-scale and in-house but it's still some time away from general use. All we know is 2019.

Quote

The public trial for Project Xcloud will begin sometime in 2019.

My Thoughts: The Xbox team are fully utilising the position they're in, they have the financial and technological support of Microsoft and are taking advantage of the Azure cloud. It's obviously a big advantage for them over their competitors but also it will be interesting to see now Google and Microsoft competing for Cloud game-streaming dominance and it makes me wonder whether or not Sony are paying attention...

 

I suggest watching the video, they details the custom blades they've designed for their data centres, fascinating stuff and it's definitely the way of the future and no one can deny that.

 

What does the community think?

[Enderman]

Linus was right, cloud gaming is here.

Nvidia has the same sorta thing going on and it works pretty well for casual gaming.

[ZacoAttaco]

8 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Linus was right, cloud gaming is here.

Nvidia has the same sorta thing going on and it works pretty well for casual gaming.

GeForce NOW is a thing, Google's Project Yeti is a thing. Even Steam Link was local network game-streaming. It's been in the works for a while and we'll see what happens when it launches.

 

I think the key word casual is though, I couldn't see anyone playing competitively for a while yet. Can't risk latency.

 

I thought Phil Spencer made an interesting point, he said for other forms of media like music or video, you can stream and are not limited to one or two devices. Like Netflix for example, it's available on nearly every device that connects to the internet. Gaming obviously requires a lot more processing power so that's why it's not as easy as video or music streaming but it's an interesting point of view.

[schwellmo92]

2 hours ago, ZacoAttaco said:

GeForce NOW is a thing, Google's Project Yeti is a thing. Even Steam Link was local network game-streaming. It's been in the works for a while and we'll see what happens when it launches.

 

I think the key word casual is though, I couldn't see anyone playing competitively for a while yet. Can't risk latency.

 

I thought Phil Spencer made an interesting point, he said for other forms of media like music or video, you can stream and are not limited to one or two devices. Like Netflix for example, it's available on nearly every device that connects to the internet. Gaming obviously requires a lot more processing power so that's why it's not as easy as video or music streaming but it's an interesting point of view.

Wouldn’t the latency be exactly the same? When you’re playing games now if you shoot an opponent that still needs to transmit to the game server and then back to your PC, with streaming you’re just transmitting commands and receiving images, you still have the latency of sending and receiving on both.

[ZacoAttaco]

2 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

Wouldn’t the latency be exactly the same? When you’re playing games now if you shoot an opponent that still needs to transmit to the game server and then back to your PC, with streaming you’re just transmitting commands and receiving images, you still have the latency of sending and receiving on both.

There is just another potential point of failure I guess, I mean most people don't even use wireless mouses when gaming 'competitively'. Either way you're going to get higher latency because there is another barrier between you and the server.

 

Although...now that I think about it, everything is running from Xbox Live services so your inputs are going to essentially the same location. Good point.

[Curufinwe_wins]

You know... that's actually really brilliant compared even to cloud pc gaming. I mean think of how much cheaper a xbox SoC is to make compared to an equivalent pc component list. And they definitely scale well with size and power since the entire system could go on a pcie blade within power target with the huge cooling servers get.

[sazrocks]

13 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

Wouldn’t the latency be exactly the same? When you’re playing games now if you shoot an opponent that still needs to transmit to the game server and then back to your PC, with streaming you’re just transmitting commands and receiving images, you still have the latency of sending and receiving on both.

Yes, but as of now (native playing) there is sub 15ms latency between your input of an action and its appearance on the screen. This allows the game to feel (and essentially be) more responsive compared to 30ms + that cloud gaming will have (~100ms is more realistic). This leads to lagging that feel like absolute garbage to play with a mouse on, but can be serviceable with a controller.

[Master Disaster]

Why wouldn't the greedy publishers want total control over their games after the point of sale? Streaming removes piracy and modding in one go and allows them to still charge us for a product that we never actually own and have no rights to beyond playing it.

 

It's a win win win for them and a lose lose lose lose for us as we're also left dealing with latency issues.

 

I called this a long time ago, by the end of next decade gamers will have 2 choices, stream or don't play.

Edited October 10, 2018 by Master Disaster
fixed a mistake

[Master Disaster]

3 hours ago, ZacoAttaco said:

GeForce NOW is a thing, Google's Project Yeti is a thing. Even Steam Link was local network game-streaming. It's been in the works for a while and we'll see what happens when it launches.

 

I think the key word casual is though, I couldn't see anyone playing competitively for a while yet. Can't risk latency.

 

I thought Phil Spencer made an interesting point, he said for other forms of media like music or video, you can stream and are not limited to one or two devices. Like Netflix for example, it's available on nearly every device that connects to the internet. Gaming obviously requires a lot more processing power so that's why it's not as easy as video or music streaming but it's an interesting point of view.

The thing about that is do most of the publishers really care about competitive gameplay? Obviously a few do (Activision Blizzard are one example) but most of the larger AAA houses wouldn't give a flying eff if competitive gaming disappeared tomorrow and unfortunately, in the gaming industry, once a formula has been proven to work and make money by one company EVERYBODY dives in head first as quickly as possible throwing away any morality they might have had in pursuit of moar £€¥$¢

[ZacoAttaco]

26 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

You know... that's actually really brilliant compared even to cloud pc gaming. I mean think of how much cheaper a xbox SoC is to make compared to an equivalent pc component list. And they definitely scale well with size and power since the entire system could go on a pcie blade within power target with the huge cooling servers get.

I agree, if anyone in the world was positioned to do this properly, you'd say Microsoft would be high on that list. Also I think they implied that 4 Xbox systems could fit on a single custom blade. Expand-ability potential is real.

22 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Why wouldn't the greedy publishers want total control over their games after the point of sale? Streaming removes piracy and modding in one go and allows them to still charge us for a product that we never actually own and have no rights to beyond playing it.

 

It's a win win win for them and a lose lose lose lose for us as we're also left dealing with latency issues.

 

I called this a long time ago, by the end of next decade gamers will have 2 choices, stream or don't play.

You're probably right but you'd have to imagine we'd get to a point where latency would be 'nearly unnoticeable', it could take many years to reach that point. Like @sazrocks pointed out, with a controlled it wouldn't be nearly as noticeable. Still, it's a tough one.

 

We just have to wait and see and Microsoft will receive feedback based on subscriptions, if latency is too high then they won't see great subscription numbers, people will need to vote with their wallets.

13 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

The thing about that is do most of the publishers really care about competitive gameplay? Obviously a few do (Activision Blizzard are one example) but most of the larger AAA houses wouldn't give a flying eff if competitive gaming disappeared tomorrow and unfortunately, in the gaming industry, once a formula has been proven to work and make money by one company EVERYBODY dives in head first as quickly as possible throwing away any morality they might have had in pursuit of moar £€¥$¢

You make an interesting point about whether or not publishers care about competitive gameplay, here's my counter: esports.

 

Every major publisher is trying to get at least one or two of their games to be an esport, particularly if there's a popular multiplayer mode and they support it. I agree that the industry goes through phases, recently MOBAs now Battle Royale but a lot of those games are still popular esports and they have a solid few years of popularity.

 

Microsoft's first party with Halo, they've been pushing their professional scene so they're going to have to ensure for Halo Infinite that they have a competitive experience, whether or not it's through streaming remains to be seen.

[asus killer]

games as service, monthly fees, user data to sell, no game resales, no piracy, no modding, easier to push microtransactions as everyone will be online, no offline play and a even bigger shift from low return single player games to multyplayer cow milking experiences.

 

On a side note what the hell can ever go wrong with a stream service from a company called MS, i'm sure it will be a flawless experience.

[ravenshrike]

There's a reason that PSNow went from streaming to streaming and downloading, and it's not because streaming was considered adequate by the majority of the userbase.

[Delicieuxz]

Notice how in the demo of the racing game they used a track section where the car can run in a completely straight line so that there is no player input on the steering? I'm guessing that's because they didn't want people to see the latency that would be obvious if any steering movements were made.

[schwellmo92]

3 hours ago, sazrocks said:

Yes, but as of now (native playing) there is sub 15ms latency between your input of an action and its appearance on the screen. This allows the game to feel (and essentially be) more responsive compared to 30ms + that cloud gaming will have (~100ms is more realistic). This leads to lagging that feel like absolute garbage to play with a mouse on, but can be serviceable with a controller.

I’m sure they’ve considered that, it wouldn’t be a good experience with 100ms of input lag. I think they’ll be using a hybrid approach to rendering the games, with the local device (pc/console/mobile) being told what to render and handling input, with all the expensive calculations being done on the Xbox cloud, time will tell.

[asus killer]

2 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

I’m sure they’ve considered that, it wouldn’t be a good experience with 100ms of input lag. I think they’ll be using a hybrid approach to rendering the games, with the local device (pc/console/mobile) being told what to render and handling input, with all the expensive calculations being done on the Xbox cloud, time will tell.

i don't think the user device can do any rendering, the data would have to go back and forth as to the MS servers know what is being handled in the users side. Wouldn't it escalate the problem?

[ZacoAttaco]

3 hours ago, ravenshrike said:

There's a reason that PSNow went from streaming to streaming and downloading, and it's not because streaming was considered adequate by the majority of the userbase.

I'd argue that Microsoft has better infrastructure already in place, but the proof is in the pudding as they say and we just don't know.

 

I think even if it is disappointing on launch, they won't be quick to abandon the technology like Sony has. Microsoft has to be all in on cloud-computing, I think it's a big part of their business moving forward, they can't afford to lose out on market share like they did with the mobile market for example.

2 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Good luck selling to people with poor internet access

It's going to rough here in Australia, that's for sure.

[Calt]

4 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

The thing about that is do most of the publishers really care about competitive gameplay? Obviously a few do (Activision Blizzard are one example) but most of the larger AAA houses wouldn't give a flying eff if competitive gaming disappeared tomorrow and unfortunately, in the gaming industry, once a formula has been proven to work and make money by one company EVERYBODY dives in head first as quickly as possible throwing away any morality they might have had in pursuit of moar £€¥$¢

[Misanthrope]

Well it lines up with my thoughts on the "PS5" which is probably a cloud based effort as well only from Sony.

 

I am still not hearing any solutions to the big elephant in the room for this tech: American ISPs and their now consolidated and absolute control of bandwidth: ISPs will gauge out Microsoft for every penny they can get away with or throttle the service into irrelevance.

 

More over if Sony also launches a streaming service (Or pushes it's current one far more) then you can potentially get into a really stupid bandwidth war: ISP A is best for Xbox Cloud while ISP B is "optimized" for Sony so now people loyal to company A might only have feasible service for ISP that supports company B and viceversa.

 

This services just do not work without net neutrality and investing on them before that is fixed seems short sighted.

[BuckGup]

How about work on getting SIMPLY internet to 4.22 billion people. Yeah over half the population still doesn't have internet

[ScratchCat]

4 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

Notice how in the demo of the racing game they used a track section where the car can run in a completely straight line so that there is no player input on the steering? I'm guessing that's because they didn't want people to see the latency that would be obvious if any steering movements were made.

Watch the movement here, there is a visible delay between moving the right stick (just after the explosion) and the player rotating and this is probably in an optimal setting.

[Stefan Payne]

10 hours ago, ZacoAttaco said:

Microsoft has officially announced their forthcoming streaming platform, titled: Project CloudX.

Good thing they were the first with something like that...

 

 

Oh wait, Sony had something like that for Years...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Now

[Stefan Payne]

14 minutes ago, ScratchCat said:

Watch the movement here, there is a visible delay between moving the right stick (just after the explosion) and the player rotating and this is probably in an optimal setting.

Of course there is!

That is a technical limitation as you have to transfer the stuff over many hundreds of kilometres and that stuff has to be encoded, decoded and all that stuff takes time - noticable so...

 

So its not viable for some quick games. For classical, round based JRPGs, it doesn't matter...

[TacoSenpai]

I don't know we'll see how it catches on.  If gaming does just go to monthly subscription and streaming without actually owning the game digitally or physically I won't buy any new games. I Have a collection built up with titles from PS4, Wii, Wii U, Gamecube, 3DS, Nswitch, DS, GBA, and SNES Classic.  I suppose it'll free up funds and time to pursue my retro collection more

[Doobeedoo]

Bah all this streaming. Like internet bandwidth requirements is the first barrier for most people, quality, lag, less control over options etc. Price. 

Just make XB games on PC as well MS not hard. You love PC gaming don't you. 

[sazrocks]

4 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

I’m sure they’ve considered that, it wouldn’t be a good experience with 100ms of input lag. I think they’ll be using a hybrid approach to rendering the games, with the local device (pc/console/mobile) being told what to render and handling input, with all the expensive calculations being done on the Xbox cloud, time will tell.

That’s not possible without developing the game specificallly to do that, and the OP says that microsoft wants games to run unmodified on this system.