Game designer of Braid and now The Witness, Jonathan Blow is not very happy with the direction Microsoft is taking with the Xbox One.
During the Xbox One reveal earlier this week, Microsoft had announced that they will be backing the new console with 300,000 servers. When the original Xbox was launched back in 2001 it had 500 servers which later on grew to 3000 servers with the Xbox 360. Currently they have 15,000 servers that are powering the modern Xbox Live experience.
There was a report last week where Microsoft claimed that the Xbox One will become more powerful with the use of cloud services. Blow thinks this is bullshit and in a series of tweets he criticizes Microsoft’s business strategy for the Xbox One.
More cloud processing BS: joystiq.com/2013/05/24/rep… Someone please call their bluff on this.
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) May 25, 2013
In another tweet he questions the business strategy for Xbox One and he does not like when companies lie contemptuously.
@jonathan_blow not to mention what happens in future when those servers are turned off and X1 is retro console? Will games be unplayable?
— Joshua Hughes (@ZookeyTK) May 25, 2013
@misterfaulkner I am not worked up, I just don't like it when companies lie so contemptuously.
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) May 25, 2013
He further claims that each of the servers are actually virtual and he himself can can make 10,000 servers per host. Apparently, he thinks this is all a lie. (For your information: In Virtual Servers, multiple customers are hosted together on a single server and each of them share the total resources. This is unlike the dedicated server where each customer is allocated a set number of resources which is normally more compared to a Virtual server).
@stestagg I can spin up 10000 virtual servers per host. They would just all suck. Saying 300k when they are virtual is lie.
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) May 25, 2013
However, there is no confirmation on whether Microsoft will be using virtual servers, so we have to go by what Blow says above.
He does make sense in many ways though. What if your internet connection goes off and you are disconnected to the cloud? Will the Xbox One be able to render advance physics or other complex simulations in such a scenario? Many such confusing questions remain. Let’s hope that Microsoft clears the dust at E3.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.