jhmtehgamr20xx
Banned
I'm smelling a Sony-Microsoft console in 5 years time. Just watch.
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Microsoft: Azure is available to everyone, including PS exclusives
- Thread starter Jarod McChicken
- Start date
Why? Because Microsoft has a cloud platform service? That's a bit of a stretch..
They shouldn't. I didn't suggest that, or anything like it.
The op pointed out that Phil Spencer said that Azure was available to Sony. I mentioned that MS would love to take a big client(sony) from the competition (amazon). Sony have 0 reason to switch.
ChosenPredator
Banned
I wish it would end all the fanboy caca in one swift hadoken lol
Doctor_Thomas
Member
Realistically, unless Microsoft were to undercut Amazon in price or offer Sony some sort of incentive, why change? On that note, Microsoft's other clients would feel a little annoyed that Sony are getting preferential treatment.
Or that their businesses are larger than their consoles. I mean for years Sony partnered with Microsoft making Vaio PC with Windows, Microsoft licensing Sony technologies like Blu-ray. All these businesses work together for licenses, other products.
If it ever made better financial sense, you might even see a day where you see Sony hardware running with Xbox software and online services.
Microsoft does not equal Xbox, and Sony does not equal Playstation. How is Sony asking to use Azure servers for their games any different than Microsoft getting the Blu-ray license for their console?
Samurai G0SU
Member
Would be interesting to see Sony and MS pr a game cooperatively. But i think their best intersts wouldn't be met so that's out the window.
Cool to see that open dialog though. It's pretty common business sense, but many people won't think that unless it came from the horses mouth.
Cool to see that open dialog though. It's pretty common business sense, but many people won't think that unless it came from the horses mouth.
CrimsonEclipse
Member
Think it was a joke....
^^^This... All that nonsense about the cloud being an Xbox exclusive feature was bogus.
DannyDanger
Member
Wasn't it just free servers for Xbox exclusives?
I never read anything about azure being exclusive
I never read anything about azure being exclusive
*Sony clicks and drags PSN icon into Azure.exe*
justsomeguy
Member
It partly depends on your definition of "easily".
I suspect it is far easier for Phil Spencer to speak to Scott Guthrie and say "Hey, XBox needs this capability in Azure" and for it to happen, than it is for someone at Sony to call someone at Amazon and get the same kind of instant response. That's what I was getting at, and having worked directly with Azure product teams (I'm an MS employee) I can tell you they are incredibly responsive to internal requests for change/capabilities.
Then again nothing would surpise me at MS - but having been on the receiving end of some emails from ScottGu recently, I wouldn't underestimate the power having a couple of CVPs focused on a deliverable.
But yes, at a high level both cloud platforms offer similar capabilities as far as I know. I'm talking about the effort/ease/speed/funding to focus or enhance those capabilities into a specific arena such as gaming.
This.
justsomeguy
Member
Right. This is the stuff Sony wouldn't have access to. They can build their own of course. Auto scaling is a standard cloud pattern.
UnemployedVillain
Member
Crazy Kaz though...
kavanf1
Member
I'm absolutely amazed that you think that. The difference between Titanfall and the average P2P COD game is night and day.
You mean that thing most of us have been saying since the initial reveal? The only people that ever clung to the belief that "the power of the cloud" was a real feature and couldn't recognize that is just servers are rabid fanboys.
justsomeguy
Member
The trouble with that generally decent OP you linked/wrote is that you don't draw any comparison to dedicated servers, which also have the constrains of latency, inputs, cost to run and so on and yet have managed to run MMOs and similar for years. It comes across as "cloud won't work because of X", whereas in reality it's "this is a new way of doing dedicated servers. There's just a limit on how much you can push to them".
edit: did MS ever specify offload of rendering? I thought it was just left generally vague, "Power of the cloud!"?
A few people are making up their own narrative because they saw Power of the Cloud as a bulletpoint on an xbox presentation.
Why would it be up to Sony for a game they have nothing to do with. Each developer /publisher will pick the online service to run their multiplayer component on.
Because Respawn/EA may want Sony to foot half the costs for the service? Not sure. I know with Azure and Microsoft Respawn gets a huge discount.
Its no different than ea/respawn going to amazon or rackspace to get servers, they wouldn't bring along Sony and Microsoft to the meetings to make a deal and ask each to cover the price.
Microsoft gave discounts to exclusives using the service, doubt they will continue that if it isn't. This is still up to the publisher /dev to pay for the price of the servers back end they want to go with. Again, nothing to do with Sony.
electric turd
Banned
Can someone please explain to me what exactly "the cloud" BS is supposed to be? I understand what Microsoft sold it as but the final product is snake oil. Titanfall for example......what was accomplished in this that needed the so-called cloud????
IIRC A.I, Dedicated Servers, and cloud computing. Used it for Forza Drivatars and Halo 5 A.I in War zone for example. Titanfall used it for the bots. And the computing part were the long awaited destruction physics in Crackdown 3.
Got damn I can't wait for C3.
electric turd
Banned
Ok.....can someone tell me why something as simple as what you listed cant be done locally instead of the "cloud" marketing stuff? Drivatars I understand its using driver info from other players.
UnemployedVillain
Member
Because local systems have an upper limit on computational power while cloud based systems don't really. They can scale up/down as needed
Yep. This isn't new in the slightest.
Close your legs, that's the source of the foul nonsense you're smelling
It doesn't need to be Azure. That's just one of many similar services. I think what you mean is you want Titanfall 2 to have dedicated servers. There is no reason why it's severs need to be specifically Azure based.
The destruction in Crackdown couldn't be done locally. There are videos showing and explaining it.
They do have an upper limit, simply because you pay more as you use more.
Ivory Samoan
Gold Member
First thing I thought when I saw the title: it's so superior it's not even funny.
...especially for us here in NZ/AUS: local Azure network here is amazing.
ElRenoRaven
Member
You know I'd welcome that to be honest. I'm tired of having to buy multiple consoles. Course I know I'm in the minority on that.
UnemployedVillain
Member
That's not a technological upper limit, and it's besides the point. The point is, they're not nearly as bounded as a fixed hardware console is. They can take advantage of multiple servers and they can take advantage of more powerful servers as those become available and cheaper.
Do you know how render farms work? They take a task that would take one machine ages and distribute it across multiple machines (assuming it can be parallelized) and that's the idea of cloud computing, taking a task and distributing it across multiple internet connected (cloud) machines to solve it much quicker than a single one could
anothertech
Member
I was under the impression Xbox devs had a free or lessexpensive access to azure for Xbox games? Is this mistaken?
TBiddy
Member
Who ever said that it was anything else than servers? I assume you mean, that people thought it was some magic pixie dust?
No, they wish to sell one of the products in their portfolio, also to their competitors. It's common practice in the IT industry. See Apple/Samsung, Microsoft/Apple and more.
yeah i know , just was a bit sarcastic ;-)
They way they marketed it before was some kind of glorious save-the-world and gaming kind of magical power of the cloud .... i am just disgusted my such marketing as its just standard cloud service and imo not that amazing
I'm sorry but what?? Do you have any source to back this up? I would be really interested to know how this is remotely possible since it would mean essentially memory mapping pages to a remote destination (not that big a deal) and somehow have the remote machine write directly to the memory, but since the only interface the remote machine has to the memory is over the NIC that would mean that the NIC has to handle its normal duties of passing packets along to the CPU, but also it has to have its own processor where it not just gets the packets but knows that they are special azure packets that are writing to memory, and then it needs to have a direct bus to RAM and be able to access that memory in a conflict free way. Even more impressively that means that both the ethernet connection as well as the wifi connection need to have the same path to RAM.
That would be a very specialized hardware setup, difficult and expensive to implement, and entirely unnecessary since the amount of CPU used to write network results to RAM would not be enough to spend the money on.
So yeah do you have anything to back this up? Because I'm highly sceptical.