In a recent Q&A for Games Industry International, President of Worldwide Studios for SCE Shuhei Yoshida addressed questions about Microsoft’s use of the Cloud for extra power on the Xbox One, and whether Gaikai would be capable of the same.
Regardless, it seems that Sony’s view of the Cloud is different from Microsoft’s. “We’ve been clear on what cloud gaming means, and that’s getting games to run on the server and sending that video signal to a distant device. The way they are using cloud computing seems very different and I totally don’t understand what they mean by that. So we can’t react to what they are saying because we don’t understand.”
“The explanation I found personally was, again, an article on Digital Foundry. They went through all the computing tasks a game goes through and for each one they checked off if it can actually be done on the server versus the client, and most of the tasks a game has to perform, they said, cannot be done on the server because of the huge latency and the bandwidth.
“There’s so much data going back and forth between the CPU and memory and GPU inside the console compared to going through the internet…There were maybe four or five tasks that actually could be done on the server. So that was very educational to me. After reading the article, the Microsoft message was even more confusing to me.”
Dubious claims by Microsoft or are there things we yet don’t know about the Xbox One’s Cloud computing capabilities? We’ll find out when the console launches on November 22nd. Meanwhile, Sony’s PS4 releases tomorrow in North America with a November 29th release in Europe.