Jonathan Blow: Microsoft's Cloud/Server Claims Are Lies

[nexus]

Cloud computing SUCKS.

It has nothing to do with improving consumer experiences. They only want to move to the "cloud" because once they do, everything you buy will be wholly controlled, and streamed directly from their servers. The apex of "always online", remember that? Do you need it spelled out for ya? :|

Tired of people acting like MS are "fools" that don't know what they're talking about. They know EXACTLY what they are doing, they are just obfuscating the truth and giving out bs about how it "improves your experience".

 

[Yopaz]

It's because he's made one mediocre game and acts like he's the savior of the game industry and the only one presenting original concepts. Coming from someone with only a 2D platformer under his belt I'm not sure I would say he's offered anything new.

Does he? Is 'having an opinion that differs from the rest' now such an offense that the wholesome of the internet 'hates' him and everything he says is dismissed with the phrase 'wasn't there a reason we hate this guy'?

In the end he is a rather smart guy who sees gaming in a different light than others. It is a valid stance and many of his statements show that he puts lots of thought into what he says. Does he need to offer something 'new', especially with limited options, to say that there are things in dire need of improvement to move gaming out of the 'just entertainment' zone, trying to find the strength of gaming as a medium without copying the stregths of movies or books in that regard (a valid point in regard of the interactive medium we talk about).

I just don't get what warrants such hate from a vast majority against someone who did nothing wrong. And all I can see is just dire failure of understanding his position.

There's nothing wrong with having opinions. There's not even something wrong with having controversial opinions. However presenting your opinion as undeniable facts is stupid.

Also yes, if he is to complain about how stale the game industry has gotten, then he better offer something remotely original. 2D platformer, save the princess... yeah, he is a part of the stale game industry that he condemns.

I don't follow everything he says, so I might be judging him from limited source material, but from my point he just seems arrogant. I would love to be proven wrong on this.

 

[Zombie_Moogle]

Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?

If I recall correctly we dislike him because he's a bit of a pretentious wanker.

Yeah, but he is right more often than not.
I could probably run a couple thousand virtual servers on my PC if I made them tiny enough, so once again Blow is correct

 

[The White Hunter]

Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?

If I recall correctly we dislike him because he's a bit of a pretentious wanker.

True, but I actually think the pretentious wanker actually has a point in regards to cloud servers increasing hte power of the Console. If anything, since it will only affect consoles that are able to use the cloud servers, their 'boost' will not affect them , weakening MS's claims.

Also, I figure it would be slightly MORE draining having to keep checking the cloud server is working and saving/loading from there. I am probably wrong on this, but this is my interpretation of events.

As I said elsewhere thats a pretty big problem, I know full well he's right, I was just saying that he's generally disliked for being pretentious. You're taking resources away from the system to access this "cloud" (all my hate for the use of that term for anything, the cloud is anything outside of your local network), for what likely amounts to cloud storage of maps, or a server for a game,s o basically technology we already use day to day.

He's absolutely right, Microsoft are full of shit. Not to mention the other issue I raised: this will devour your bandwidth, rendering your connection useless to anyone else int he house, which will make you very unpopular with your parents/brother/sister/partner/spouse/tablet using dog.

Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?

If I recall correctly we dislike him because he's a bit of a pretentious wanker.

Yeah, but he is right more often than not.
I could probably run a couple thousand virtual servers on my PC if I made them tiny enough, so once again Blow is correct

I already adresseds the actual issue elsewhere in the thread. Blow is correct, it's a load of marketing bullshit. It's a glorified dedicated server at best, which is existing technology, not a next generation solution to give you lower hardware cost. If it does indeed lower the hardware cost you can bet your ass you'll pay through the teeth for Xbox Live and acess to these servers, and it will be mandatory.

Also, bandwidth issues, issues for poor or slow connections, issues with ping timings to the servers from parts of the world not the US.

I know the US is their biggest and strongest market but Microsoft is a global corporation targeting global markets, it really should take into account Europe at the very least and factor it into it's plans.

 

[Yellowbeard]

You know what they say, "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

 

[shrekfan246]

Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?

Actually no, people don't have a reason to hate him. I haven't seen any reason that is more valid than my subjective 'dislike' of game development houses that don't cater to my platform of choise or people that I don't understand.

There, I said it. People hate him because they don't understand him. Not that I try to defend his words, in many cases he has a vastly different view on the whole gaming genre than most people do but fuck, more often than not people clearly don't get what he is saying.

... ?

I wouldn't go so far as to say I 'hate' the guy (that word is thrown around far too liberally), but I dislike him because he is poorly spoken and has currently put out one rather average puzzle-platformer that had pretensions of being some 'deep' story which in reality was a load of piffle, but despite that speaks out to the gaming media as if he's some savant who will bring us into a Gaming Renaissance and they listen to what he says because Braid; He's either a master troll or a pretentious wanker.

Not to say that he's necessarily wrong to speak up about this. And personal opinions shouldn't really weigh in on how much you listen to a guy's word, you can despise somebody and acknowledge they're correct at the same time. Personally, I don't give a toss about "cloud gaming" or whatever. I want the actual hardware to be able to pump out that performance, not to rely on some nebulous promise that my spotty internet connection might possibly improve my experience. Well, there's also the fact that I never connect my consoles to the internet. So, if Microsoft is really going to push so hard for cloud gaming and whatever else, then they've lost at least one console sale.

 

[Yopaz]

Also yes, if he is to complain about how stale the game industry has gotten, then he better offer something remotely original. 2D platformer, save the princess... yeah, he is a part of the stale game industry that he condemns.

I don't follow everything he says, so I might be judging him from limited source material, but from my point he just seems arrogant. I would love to be proven wrong on this.

This is his new/upcoming game:

Spoiler

Braid was rather cool, I'm looking forward to this one because it looks nice too.

Also what he basically said wasn't that he "doesn't know what he is talking about", but that from his limited experience developing games he knows what they are claiming is bullshit (which isn't hard, because most people with a basic understanding of what is involved in what Microsoft is claiming would probably say the same) but doesn't have the deeper knowledge to explain it in-depth and wishes for someone more proficient in that particular field to do so.

Yes, I have seen his game and while it looks promising that doesn't change the fact that he's released one game and seems to think that Braid is the only thoughtful game ever released.

As for the rest of your post. I am not talking about his stand on this Microsoft thing. He is most likely right. I am talking about things he has said in the past and why those things make me dislike him because that's what this discussion is about. I would say this might be the first time I agree with him, but he does often spout bullshit.

Anyway, I will judge his new game on its merits rather than my opinion on him and I am not going to disagree with him on this issue just because I dislike him. I agree with him here, his game might turn out to be decent, but I don't like him.

 

[bug_of_war]

Blow is a known blowhard who likes to talk without any real substance. No, not talk. Rant. Essentially, he's a gamer who rants about stuff with no real basis who gets credibility because he made Braid.

I'd like to have the capability to put out a hit indie game. Then, any stupid thing I said would be news. I'd screw with gaming media SO HARD.

...Which, I suspect, is what Blow is doing.

So basically, he's just a dude who made one thing that a few people said was above average, which ended up inflating his ego to the point where he's become a hipster with pushing power. Great...as if I didn't need another reason to dislike indie developers.

OT: Look, if you're gonna make a claim, back it up. Show some evidence that it will fail, don't just assume it will and then say you're right but someone should come and show people why, that just shows you're a lazy ass who like to fire without thinking. Sure, Microsoft's claim is quite bold and does sound a little skewed, but I want hard factual evidence to prove that it is bullshit before I agree with the claim.

 

[Matthi205]

Edit: Assuming this does actually work it would in all likelyhood devour your bandwidth and render your connection unusable at the same time for anyone you share it with. I can't speak for everyone but I live with other people and they all use the internet, this would not go down well.

That's only the consumer half you're talking about here.

As a developer, you would have to make your game with this in mind, thus making it always-online and pissing your customers off, or put in several different modes which would end up having the same difficulty as making the game for the PC in the first place.

Just generally on the DirectXBox "One": Hardware is adequate, knowing the low TDP of AMD's APUs it's probably built to last this time around. On the software side of things we have too much buzzword bullshit, indicating that the lead designer was either micromanaged by someone who doesn't know the realities of the market the XBox has, or wasn't an engineer at all. The internet infrastructure we're having at the moment is not ready for all these cloud and streaming services, and, living in Europe, I can assure you that I can dig up an old Satellite receiver and get better quality TV than with the XBox "One". As for the Kinect 2, the idea that MS had with that thing will probably get picked up in a German court sometime after the thing hits stores. Dragon costs me about 115 euros less (it's something like 35) and does a better job at voice recognition.

 

[The White Hunter]

Edit: Assuming this does actually work it would in all likelyhood devour your bandwidth and render your connection unusable at the same time for anyone you share it with. I can't speak for everyone but I live with other people and they all use the internet, this would not go down well.

That's only the consumer half you're talking about here.

As a developer, you would have to make your game with this in mind, thus making it always-online and pissing your customers off, or put in several different modes which would end up having the same difficulty as making the game for the PC in the first place.

Just generally on the DirectXBox "One": Hardware is adequate, knowing the low TDP of AMD's APUs it's probably built to last this time around. On the software side of things we have too much buzzword bullshit, indicating that the lead designer was either micromanaged by someone who doesn't know the realities of the market the XBox has, or wasn't an engineer at all. The internet infrastructure we're having at the moment is not ready for all these cloud and streaming services, and, living in Europe, I can assure you that I can dig up an old Satellite receiver and get better quality TV than with the XBox "One". As for the Kinect 2, the idea that MS had with that thing will probably get picked up in a German court sometime after the thing hits stores. Dragon costs me about 115 euros less (it's something like 35) and does a better job at voice recognition.

I only addressed the consumer half as I don't have the full understanding of how it would affect developers, though I am aware it would likely end up being more demanding of their time and effort, and essentially bloat the development procedure and thus the cost.

Hardware is okay, the only concern I have is that the GPU is substantially less well equipped than that in the PS4, at least if those specs anandtech had were accurate. In the long run that in itself could just lead to xbox games being 720 whilst their PS4 counterparts could be in 1080 or 1600x900. However what also concerns me is that know AMD's APU's with a degree of familiarity, it could mean that it's CPU ends up being of a lower class too and that would lead to other issues. As for an actual TDP I saw 100W thrown around for both consoles system wide...

The issue with xbox longevity isn't that the thermal output is bad, it's that the cooling is atrocious, it's a tiny passive heatsink with poor quality thermal compound. I've opened a few to try fix and found that modding the cooler and applying a small amount of high quality compound is generally the fastest route to a fix. It'd be much quieter if they had an active cooling system and set the whole thing to a lower fan speed if you ask me and still resolve the heating problem. Maybe the extra $30 that could cost microsoft was too much.

And yes in Europe this thing is gonna be a huge issue, most of the infrastructure can't deal with streaming games very well and the video streaming is likely to be of relatively low quality. That said they haven't announced any of those features for the European territory anyway, so it doesn't affect us.

And yes the Kinect 2 is kind of pointless and it's potential for intrusion is eventually going to end up being dragged in front of a court somewhere in the world. But thats never stopped Microsoft before!

At any rate, just on paper and from wht we know so far, I think the PS4 might well be Sony's chance to find the mass market favour again.

 

[veloper]

A cloud could save the user some diskspace on the tiny Xbone harddrive. That's it.

What an internet connection cannot do is compete with an internal 256-bit wide bus with a bandwidth in an order of magnitude of 100GB/s and a latency measured in nanoseconds.
There's no way the cloud can assist with GPU computations, so prettier visuals are unlikely.
At best, theoreticly, you could offload the AI to the cloud and get a slow-reacting AI (could work for a game like chess, where a little latency won't make a difference).

 

[RandV80]

Yeah it sounds like a lot of bullshit to me as well, though I've been wondering if they're going to use it as an excuse/justification for the continued annual fee for using Xbox Live? Like will you be able to use these 'cloud' features if you're not a paying member?

It's been a long time coming, but I think we may have a challenger to Sega's old "Blast Processing!" marketing gimmick.

 

[Gothproxy]

So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.

It's like a dick measuring contest, but then with bullshit.

As a networking student (NCM), I can tell you that 'virtual' servers, no matter how many you "spin up" still run off of a physical machine. In order to have 10,000 virtual servers run at minimum capacity you will need a physical machine the size of the WOPR (from War Games). Even if you use VMWare or vSphere, you will need massive amount of processors, ram modules, etc. in order to run them all. What Microsoft is boasting would require hundreds of mainframes, not servers in order to function.

Now, Microsoft being Microsoft (and I do like their tech), this shouldn't be a problem for them. But to claim that a cloud service (which is really just a bunch of servers) can improve graphics? I'm sorry, but even my fellow students who are finishing up their game program degrees are saying "Wha?" Even if the cloud servers were able to improve the graphics of games, the data that it "enhanced" would still need to travel back to your Xbone over the internet and we all know how crappy that can be at times. If you are an FPS fan....that lag can kill, and not in the good way.

 

[Baldr]

I still have no idea what a Cloud is, although I confess I find it to be a pleasant image, but from reading some of the more knowledgeable posts on this thread, all I can picture now is that gaming on the new consoles is going to be like watching a video on Youtube when the servers are overloaded.

Am I going to end up sitting watching that fucking circle of dots chase itself while the rest of my level buffers?

Cloud is just a term for "computer processing" that would normally be done in your machine, done over the internet on a server somewhere else.

Sometime it is very usefully, when you got a local machine that doesn't have the best cpu, memory, and stuff like that, the server can do it. Like playing AAA games on your iPad. The iPad doesn't have the components to fully render and play, but something like OnLive, the server can take care of everything.

However, the downside, like you know is it has to be done over the internet.

I don't think many people know this: Microsoft is integrating Xbox Live into it's already established business services: Microsoft Azure. So when they say 300,000 servers, I believe it. They need much more servers for the business ends.

 

[The Lugz]

What I want to know is how exactly would cloud computing help? If I'm correct, it would mean that some of the calculations would be done server-side, right? OK, I can see the idea behind this, but doesn't this mean that you would need a constant, stable, high speed connection to play any game that used that feature?

Also, can anyone point me to a successful example of cloud computing? The first two that come to mind are SimCity (lol!) and OnLive (lol?), and that doesn't really instill confidence. But even if this is the best cloud computing incarnation in gaming ever, it would still mean the console would need a constant internet connection to play games.

So, the console doesn't have to be constantly online, only needs to check in once every 24 hours, but fuck you if you want to play something?

for the record, there Is no viable latency tolerant cloud service right now

##EDIT## 'for the uk'

it doesn't exist. it may exist in 2-3 years when iceland is covered from shore to shore in server clusters and more fibre than the rest of civilization put together but until then it's just a series of tubez.

why iceland? just google it for more exact details, but it happens to be an ideal location due to it's VAST geothermal reserves and frigid temperatures, just think about the heat of one pc and multiply it by 10 million and you'll see the logic
these are under construction right now, and will lower cloud service latency to around 17 ms for the uk which is just barely fast enough to be capable of helping your console do anything

the golden number is about 8 ms, because you could render extra frames and plug game data in at that speed, but anywhere upto 25-30 ( 30 fps game requires a 33 ms refresh rate if the resources are ready or not. ) can potentially add to the game, now the thing is you'll be able to stream audio, video and ai resources across the connection which are not particularly latency sensitive you can simplify 'calculate all ai, look up emotion sheets, check reputations, factions ect. whatever variables your bots will be using. send move, send attack, send ability' to simply 'move x use y' and that will likely get to the game in time to be useful offloading of resources especially if there are a Vast number of ai entities in a given game

so, yes there is some truth to the cloud assist processing

which does translate into the console having more free resources, which does mean more pretty pictures.

bare in mind, this is just an example as far as i'm aware only microsoft and a few select members of the game dev community know exactly what IS for a fact being sent all i'm saying is it is theoretically possible that they're adding to the processing of the console

to the best of my understanding, the System on chip uber throughput mid-range parts will match a higher spec machine, and that slightly higher spec machine will have some of it's power beamed to it via the cloud

this means that it's using a belt and bracers approach to eek every last scrap of power from it's architecture, which could be a good thing, and lead to unexpected levels of epic, or alternatively lead to ruin if it isn't implemented well, just look at sony's attempt to do something flashy last gen for an example of why this could potentially go wrong

but the bottom line is this, we don't yet know the specifics all we can do is postulate on the scraps of information we have and it isn't much to go on just yet.

i'm still dubious overall

 

[Elate]

I.. Just.. With this, and Windows 8 and the direction they're trying to take with that, it's like Microsoft are purposefully trying to destroy their company.

They won't be the top dog much longer with this train of crap heading right up bullshit creek.

 

[Grabehn]

Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?

He's calling BS on Microsoft, just go with it... For now...

 

[Vivi22]

OT: Look, if you're gonna make a claim, back it up. Show some evidence that it will fail, don't just assume it will and then say you're right but someone should come and show people why, that just shows you're a lazy ass who like to fire without thinking. Sure, Microsoft's claim is quite bold and does sound a little skewed, but I want hard factual evidence to prove that it is bullshit before I agree with the claim.

It's amazing to me the number of people in this thread who don't seem to understand how the burden of proof works.

Here's the thing, even if it weren't for the fact that there are already more than a few people in this thread alone explaining why Microsoft's claims of quadrupling the Xbone's power using servers is complete and utter bullshit, Microsoft are the one's who would have to prove that it's possible to begin with. Because there is no way that I or anyone else with even a modest amount of computer knowledge knows of that makes their claim at all possible. Hell, even doubling the power of the Xbone is basically a load of crap.

Microsoft's claims are ridiculous at face value. And even if Jonathan Blow doesn't have the technical expertise to explain exactly why, he has enough knowledge to recognize that Microsoft is full of shit and to ask people to call them on it so that THEY can prove their wild claims aren't just that, and that they aren't lying to customers.

Because so far, that's what they're doing. They're saying "we can quadruple the systems power because lulz cl0uds," and expect people to buy it. The sad thing is, there are a large number of people out there who not only don't know enough to have a clue what Microsoft is talking about, but people such as yourself who will ask those who call bullshit to prove that Microsoft is wrong, rather than placing the burden of proof solely on Microsoft's shoulders where it belongs.

 

[Frostbite3789]

So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.

It's like a dick measuring contest, but then with bullshit.

This sounds about right. I'm all for makin fun of Microsoft for their absolutely shit ideas so far for the Xbone, but lets stick with the facts for now. If what they said is false, then someone who actually knows what the fuck they're talkin about can call them out on it. Someone who outright admits that he's just talkin shit and hopes someone who actually is in the know backs him up just makes him look dumb.

Remember when SimCity and the PS3 made similar claims? I do. It's not talking shit, it's someone not being censored by MS PR muzzle.

 

[Colt47]

It hasn't even gotten to E3 yet and Microsoft is already carrying a dead horse on its back. The media might as well just skip the entire showcase for the company: no one is going to even care.