Phil Spencer, who is Vice President of Gaming at Microsoft and head of the Xbox brand, thinks that gaming will eventually run on cloud.
“I think we’ll see the full spectrum from games that run 100% in the cloud streamed to any device to high end games that run highly responsive compute locally while offloading heavy latency tolerant workloads to the cloud for incredible local results,” he said.
However, Spencer believes that the move to running games in the cloud will not lead to the end of consoles. And he suggests that Microsoft is planning on this change in the industry.
“Key for me is that a local console that is able to run great games will be important for years, that’s what we are planning for,” he said.
Hajime Tabata, director of Final Fantasy XV, shares similar sentiments. He believes that the next Xbox and PlayStation will be completely cloud-based, and that the game industry will follow the film and music industries by embracing streaming services.
Xbox One exclusive Crackdown 3 is an upcoming game utilizing the cloud to improve its physics.
“We are enhancing the gaming experience by using computing power and memory that is available server-side,” said Cloudgine, the independent studio developing the cloud-based components of the game. “We offload the expensive computations to Microsoft Cloud through our platform and send the results back to the Xbox One for rendering.”
““We’re hitting about nine times the power of the Xbox One here in this demo due to the way the guys are playing,” said Dave Jones, the game’s director. “I think 13 times is our record, though. You really can raze the entire city if you want to.”
Although Crackdown 3 was initially planned to release two years ago, multiple delays led to the current release date of May 25.