With new technology always comes a range of emotions. Whether that be dread or fear or excitement, it can be hard to gauge just where everyone will stand when something that’s potentially disrupting to the status quo is about to come out. One person who seems to be pretty excited about streaming, though, is Rare Studio Head Craig Duncan.

In a Xbox Showcase livestream, Duncan talked about the future. He talked about Project Scarlett, the codename for the next generation Xbox, Microsoft’s renewed interest in the PC space and their upcoming streaming service xCloud. It seemed to be all steam ahead for him, as he says the future of gaming as limitless, especially became of doors that services like xCloud will open.

“Just seeing it playing out at that E3 briefing, seeing us talk about impacting PC gaming and the Scarlett program and what we’re doing with xCloud, it just made me excited as both a player, as a game maker, and a studio head, because I think the opportunity for gaming is going to be limitless. It seems like we can go and do things that we’ve never been able to do before.”

There’s obviously a lot of potential in streaming, particularly in reaching other markets that traditional gaming has never managed to touch in a significant way. There’s still a lot of challenges to it, however, that there doesn’t seem to be clear cut solutions to. Specifically about how these services that will be streaming huge amounts of data will work when internet speeds on a worldwide level isn’t quite up to snuff, so to speak. And nothing is going to matter if there’s no real interest in it to begin with. Interesting times ahead.

Head of Microsoft’s Xbox division and Microsoft Studios Phil Spencer was in UK this week and he got a chance to visit Playground Studios and congratulated the team on their work on Forza Horizon 2. In a tweet he mentioned: “Great visiting @WeArePlayground today, studio did amazing work on #ForzaHorizon2.”

However he didn’t stop there and revealed that he caught a glimpse of their new project and commented that their new game is a “uniquely Rare” title. He went on to tweet ” Got to play the new @RareLtd game today. Rare building a uniquely Rare game, as it should be. Great visit to the studio.”

While we’re on the subject Microsoft registered a trademark for a new Battletoads video game and there is a solid indication that Rare are actually working on it. What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments section below and stay tuned for more news and updates.

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“We’re at 1080p, but to be honest that was because our rendering guys just wanted to be at 1080p. I think when you look at the platforms, now more than ever it’s going to be about – ‘OK, the graphics and resolution are part of the story, but there’s also the service you have, the intuitiveness of the sharing, the multiplayer aspects of it.’

“Years ago, when I was a kid, it was all about how many polygons you could push around, and everyone was pixel-counting. I think that’s still important, but it’s much less of the story than it used to be.”

Isaac takes the example of cameras and the optical resolution of sensors when talking about what most consumers will be after. “I think everybody always looks at numbers. If you think about photography and cameras, it’s just megapixels, megapixels, megapixels. Can anyone really tell the difference between a 41 megapixel shot and a 21 megapixel shot? Probably not. For some people that’s going to be really really important. Some people will want to get high end PCs, and run at the highest settings they can, buy multi-thousand pound rigs to do that. But for myself personally, I’m more interested in the experience all around.

“I think ultimately it’s going to be the whole experience that people think about, and I think while Microsoft’s done well with the Xbox previously, what they’ve done with Xbox One is to build out that service. It’s going to be about supporting that box as it goes through its life, delivering those services and experiences, outside of just playing the game.

“With things like Game DVR, where you can upload your clips to the cloud. Stuff that we could only dream of last generation is going to be a reality this generation. I think that’s really where the battle will be, but obviously initially everybody just wants to compare the numbers.”

Do you agree or disagree? Let us know in the comments below.

From PlayXBLA:

“With all due respect to our friends in the media who like to frequent trademark sites, we thought we’d break this one ourselves.

“Our legal eagles have authorized us to say: ‘We have either renewed or refiled a trademark application in various jurisdictions'”.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be saying the series on the consoles any time soon. Most Rare properties have either been squandered or downright cancelled by Microsoft, as it relegated the once famed dev to Kinect Sports titles.

Killer Instinct, though, remains one of the bigger underdog fighting game series of the Nintendo era. It never quite achieved breakout success on home consoles but was still incredibly popular on the arcade circuit.

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.