Nope and yeah that is a mixed bag of who actually benefits more. Though I could see MS do it if Sony allowed it. I think MS knows they are gonna lose the console battle anyways and are trying to pivot without giving up.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Phil Spencer: Amazon and Google are ‘the main competitors going forward’ in relation to Sony and Nintendo’s ability to create a cloud infrastructure
- Thread starter Fiery Phoenix
- Start date
Nope and yeah that is a mixed bag of who actually benefits more. Though I could see MS do it if Sony allowed it. I think MS knows they are gonna lose the console battle anyways and are trying to pivot without giving up.
There's absolutely no reason they couldn't host trailers etc on mixer.
That's not at all what Phil or the article said. He specifically states that Sony and Nintendo are not competition anymore. If he was strictly talking about cloud infrastructure, those two were never competition.
" But Microsoft's Spencer says he doesn't consider Sony and Nintendo his main competition anymore, largely because neither of those Japanese companies owns its own top-end global cloud infrastructure akin to Microsoft's Azure platform. One of Microsoft's main selling points for the new Xbox will be integration with its xCloud technology, which is meant to allow you to play the same game across a console, a desktop PC and a mobile device."
The context is right there when you read the article. He is straight up saying that Sony and Nintendo can't compete anymore because of their cloud infrastructure and saying it in the context of game delivery. If he's not talking about game streaming then what services could MS deliver because they have Azure that the other two can't?
As I said he's wrong in this thinking and arguing that he wasn't talking about competing in the game space is also wrong.
Last edited:
For Microsoft the main product is now Azure, and the future is Azure Sphere. Enterprise is where they make money with office support. The IoT platform will be their new "windows" style game changer.
Windows itself is cobbled together trash that traditionally was and still is designed ass-backwards, despite working out of the box on almost any piece of hardware. It is just keeping consumers engaged in their ecosystem to add value to enterprise. It helps keep people trained to do things their way. Now it is rolling out to be obfuscated borderline-spyware, reliant on cloud services rather than a pragmatic OS for power users.
Xbox is a similar product. Only there to break even and profile consumers, indexing everyone for advertising. While we all enjoy the 3rd party powerhouse machine/subscription, the figurative value menu at McDonalds, a cheap and easy fix good enough for most. They are engaged in the social networking and profiling fight for personal data, to sell services and targeted advertising. Their competition is Google and Amazon.
Windows itself is cobbled together trash that traditionally was and still is designed ass-backwards, despite working out of the box on almost any piece of hardware. It is just keeping consumers engaged in their ecosystem to add value to enterprise. It helps keep people trained to do things their way. Now it is rolling out to be obfuscated borderline-spyware, reliant on cloud services rather than a pragmatic OS for power users.
Xbox is a similar product. Only there to break even and profile consumers, indexing everyone for advertising. While we all enjoy the 3rd party powerhouse machine/subscription, the figurative value menu at McDonalds, a cheap and easy fix good enough for most. They are engaged in the social networking and profiling fight for personal data, to sell services and targeted advertising. Their competition is Google and Amazon.
Right now, we arent seeing ipad games the rival the most demanding xbox one games and that's because GPU performance is just one piece of the pie and getting the rest of the pie into a mobile format is well behind.
To assume that issue is going to dissipate by 2030, and an iPhone will be able to run games XSX games requires a massive leap of logic. And even this issue did dissipate, you'd still be able to provide experiences via the cloud that would be impossible to compute locally, and we'll have better network infrastructure to deliver it.
And again, none of this addresses the fact that MS' cloud gaming business extends well beyond the prospects of game streaming.
Last edited:
No man. He didn't say Sony and Nintendo weren't his competition. He said "we see Amazon and Google as the main competitors going forward".
This doesnt mean that Sony and Nintendo are non-competitive when it comes to content delivery. It means for MS, the market opportunity of providing various cloud gaming solutions will surpass the market opportunity of content delivery. Therefore those companies that have the infrastructure to offer these aforementioned cloud solutions will be become the main competition.
Your conflating what Spencer said with the fact that the writer started talking about xcloud after quoting Spencer.
I mean I can't argue what the software environment is going to look like in 10 years, hardware speculation is far more concrete. We can argue about the inability to compute the experiences locally, but if you want to use proof of no software existing that takes advantage of the iPad, the same could be said that there is no advantage to cloud because we haven't actually seen experiences that require it. I already addressed the MS cloud business part in another post.
This seems like a bit of a short-sighted view when Sony or Nintendo could very easily just use AWS for their cloud infrastructure. Sure, they've then got a cost overhead that Microsoft hasn't, given that Azure is in-house, but amortised across a global audience of paying end users, I think that cost is probably pretty manageable.
I'm not conflating it, this is from the article:
" But Microsoft's Spencer says he doesn't consider Sony and Nintendo his main competition anymore"
Anymore, implies they were once in competition with them in some way. The only way we know of that they competed directly with them is through games delivery. So the complete context is that Phil is saying they were once competitors and now they aren't. The only competed in one area so he is obviously talking about games not infrastructure. The infrastructure in this quote is the reason, not the competitive industry.
Look at the quote again man. He doesnt say that Nintedo and Sony arent his competitors. He said he doesnt see them as his main competition anymore. This means that while in still in competiton with Nintendo and Sony, MS is involved in another competition that will or has become the primary competition. And that competition is leveraging cloud infrastructure to deliver gaming related products and services. Products like GameStack and Playfab that use the cloud to extend Microsofts gaming tech and support suite into games on any platform.
Microsoft is not pivoting because Xbox can't outsell PlayStation.
In that case Microsoft main rival is Amazon with Nintendo and Sony now the prize to be won.
If MS get Sony and Nintendo to use Azure they get a cut of their income without having to do a thing but provide the cloud service.
Which also means they are shifting out of that category of competition. If they are no longer concerned about them as primary competition it's because their industry position and focus is changing. Which makes less sense when Phil is saying they could try and create their version of Azure. This would have to be interpreted as MS shiftIng focus to primarily back end services like AWS is for Sony rather than continuing to focus on their own gaming brand and Primarily competing in that space.
That's not true. Microsoft is aiming to have as many customers spending money in their ecosystem across multiple connected devices.
They bought those studios for a reason. They're plan isn't that complicated.
No it doesn't mean they are shifting out of a category of competition. It means that they are adding to their list of active competitons and this new competition will be the larger market opportunity on this list.
I'm going to use totally bogus numbers just to put this in perspective:
Let's say gaming content delivery is a 20 billion dollar a year market. And MS projects their various cloud gaming services to be part of a 40 billion a year market, then the companies that could challenge all of MS various cloud gaming services and products would become MS main competiton in gaming. That doesnt mean that those who just deliver content arent competition. It doesnt mean that Sony and Nintendo "are no longer a concern". it just means that they are simultaneously taking on new challegers in a segment of the market that they expect to out pace the traditional.
Phil never said that Sony would or should be trying to create their own Azure. He said Sony doesnt have their own Azure. Despite competing in content delievery, cloud infrastructure is where MS bigger market opportunity will be. Therefore MS' biggest competition becomes those companies who can counter the services that leverage cloud infrastructure.
It's not a slight to Sony or Nintendo at all
Last edited:
Nope, nothing more has been said after that. People are expecting Nintendo will use Azure in future.
I agree with this. It's a balancing act, MS knows it. Their future lies in the cloud but at the same time their current. competition is Sony/Nintendo. They know this though.
A total gut feeling that I've mentioned before, but my Mystic Meg prediction is we'll see PlayStation Prime at some point in the future.
Someone brought this up in another thread but it's begining to look like PR for PR's sake.
Here they're claiming 1 billion XBOX ones to be sold this gen.
And no I'm not joking...
Here they're claiming 1 billion XBOX ones to be sold this gen.
And no I'm not joking...
It's not just here. The BBC reported on it with a clickbaity headline, and the comments are worse. At least the tone is better here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51400135
It's not PR for the sake of PR. MS misjudged the future of the living room with the Xbox One. With devices like Chromecasts, Roku and Fire Sticks being so cheap no one was going to pay $500 for an XB1 that did the same things. There was no real money to be made in going all in on entertainment as the people that buy those kind of devices weren't going to buy Xbox content as it was back in 2013.
With cloud it's different because it is being used a means to allow a larger gaming population (those that don't buy consoles or $60 games) to accessxbox content on any device using xCloud and gamepass.
With cloud it's different because it is being used a means to allow a larger gaming population (those that don't buy consoles or $60 games) to accessxbox content on any device using xCloud and gamepass.
The problem isn't that the software doesnt exist on iPad. It's that it cant run on iPad because the hardware is not enough. GTA5 couldnt run locally on an iphone, not without significant downgrades.
The same will be true when comparing a 2030 cell phone to a 2030 console. The form factor will mean less local processor performance compared to what a console can do. There's no way around it.
That said, I can already stream xbox one games to my phone that couldnt run locally on my phone. Presumably I'll be able to play XSX games on this same phone.
cloud compute already allows for more players and AI processes than would be possible with a local host.
Then there are MS other cloud gaming initiatives like Playfab and GameStack that are platform agnostic and they are already being used on all platforms from Android to PS4 to Steam. Games that use playfab already account for 1 over billion player accounts.
Cloud gaming is already here, even if you exclude game streaming. And as you can see from the playfab example, the potential here greatly exceeds what is possible from within the traditional console market - Which is why Spencer sees cloud providers as the main future competition.
Last edited:
Reading some of these posts one would think MS can only have one focus per division and when they even turn their heads a little bit in another direction several thousand people are immediately realigned to only work on that while dropping everything else on the floor.
Using these same arguments you would think MS stopped all development on desktop Office when that started making Office365. This is basically the same argument. In the case of Office, they considered Google Docs and related products to be the primary competition. That didn't also imply that they suddenly were going to stop updating the client applications or didn't view anyone in the client space as a competitor anymore. It's just "hey there is a new shiny over here in a market that could be worth Billions and is just starting to grow. Maybe it's worth investing more here where we could be a clear leader because of our strengths. Also, our competitors in the client space don't really have a presence in the cloud so, I guess our primary competitors in the cloud are the two giant companies that have cloud experience and have expressed an interest in adapting it to gaming."
But nope, I guess it's easier to try to spin up yet another twisted rewording and logic to try and claim MS doesn't care about console gaming anymore despite still investing billions into the market every quarter.
"Nobody -- not a single person -- is going to be weighing up an Xbox Series X in ten months' time and thinking "oh, but maybe I'll use Google Stadia instead," or... I don't know, "Amazon is a company that exists so maybe I won't get an Xbox"
It's almost like Phil said, "We will forget about traditional consoles and will now fully focus on cloud gaming". The problem is that it's not in ten months, right now I have seen examples of people saying they would like to play all of their games on a cloud gaming service, right there that should sound an alarm for anyone that cares to pay attention. This is year one and cloud gaming services will continue to improve from here. The funny part is that it is clear that Nintendo and Sony also recognize the importance of cloud gaming and the real threat it can be for traditional consoles. You can throw lines like "it will take 10 years or more for cloud gaming to become important", but honestly that is either being ignorant or dishonest about what is currently happening. The fact that Stadia failed is not what you should be focusing on, is the fact that the service appears to work for the majority of people that try it. The fact that Stadia failed on their business model and library of games is irrelevant to the fact that the service works. You only need to look at Geforce Now and how is currently getting a completely different reception that Stadia had, just based on using a different business model.
"While we don't expect all games to become cloud games any time soon, the technologies are definitely advancing. We see a future where cloud and streaming technologies will develop more and more as a means of delivering games to consumers. We must keep up with such changes in the environment. That being said, if these changes increase the worldwide gaming population, that will just give us more opportunities with our integrated hardware and software development approach to reach people worldwide with the unique entertainment that Nintendo can provide."
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9537475/akrales_171025_2091_0010.jpg)
Nintendo president: ‘we must keep up’ with cloud gaming tech
Mario’s maker is keeping an eye on streaming games
www.theverge.com
Sony considers cloud gaming important enough to work together with Microsoft on it.
"Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki admitted during Sony's FY2018 Q3 earnings call that cloud gaming is a potential future threat to its business, although the company will remain focused on hardware. "
Last edited:
This thread has read like a response to that article, in a knee jerk reaction kind of way
Amazon might be about to cost Microsoft more money than they've ever spent on gaming.
Link Alternate Article
Link Alternate Article