It’s almost become a running gag at this point- the Xbox One, which is weaker hardware than the PS4, is supposed to get some sort of secret boost to its power that puts it beyond the competition. It’s been a multitude of things since the system’s reveal- the power of the Cloud, eSRAM, DirectX 12, the decoupling of Kinect, you name it. It’s become a joke at this point.
But it seems like at this E3, Microsoft may actually be working to make good on this initial promise of ‘secret sauce’ for the Xbox One. And delivering this extra power will be… the cloud.
Developer Tech reports that a company called Cloudgine will play a part in Microsoft’s E3 conference this year. On their website they describe their technology as “delivering rendering and processing power from the cloud, allowing game developers to define new ground-breaking online gaming mechanics”.
If Microsoft does in fact manage to actually enhance the Xbox One with the cloud, there will still remain the question of how they plan to implement their cloud based solution evenly, in a world where proper broadband penetration remains too low for such a solution to be viable, a problem that Sony is also facing with its PS Now implementation.