Your post makes no sense.....PSNow's just the name of sonys streaming platform.
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Sony and Microsoft to explore strategic partnership regarding cloud-based tech for gaming & AI
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Without a definition of a modern platform, your post has no content. Isn't it the only game streaming service that exists?
Is PS Now still a bunch of PS3s and PS4s in a rack or is it a VM based solution?
Think Google Stadia. VMs.
At this moment? Yeah a bunch of PSs in a rack...still market leader.
When the other services like xCloud and Stadia releases? Who knows? Maybe they will already powered by Azzure when this happens.
Easy to lead the market when you are the only product on the market. Invoking that just reeks of partisanship.
That would be a massive conversion. Lotta work.
Yeah it's difficult to make any post on gaming side without people jumping at you screaming "console wars!"...
PSNow may have been a useful and successful exercise for Sony but the new streaming services are very different beast and a big part of that has to do with the large footprint they will have/need and the new services/capabilities they will provide beyond just simple streaming. Scaling up PSNow to compete with Stadia/Xbox streaming was always going to be a challenge which is why going with Azure makes sense.
I don't know what smartphones has to do with this.
It wouldn't turn out how you think. Like...not at all. More is better. Options are never a bad thing. Choice is the last piece of power a consumer has.
Imagine how fun a one-console future would be if PS3 was the only console on the market when it launched at 600$. Or when Microsoft tried to launch their original Xbox One. They would have had no reason to change course. Fun!
A market cannot work without competition. There would be zero reason for the one single company providing the one available product to react to criticism, because no one would ever challenge them.
Would no doubt be great for the consumer, but I just can't see it happening from a business perspective. Both services are very similar, if one would offer a noticeably better 3rd party line-up than the other the other service's sales would need to be carried by its exclusive line-up. Just can't see them allow it.
Yeah, because a certain party being able to do whatever they want because the only 2 other options for consumers are PC gaming and going streaming-only would be fantastic.... We as costumers should pray that we'll always have at least 2 hardware manufacturers (not counting Nintendo because what they do is wildly different from what Sony and Microsoft do). If we ever see the day where Sony, Microsoft or another party has a monopoly on the console market they'll instantly turn into a huge anti-consumer company.
Sony partners with the company that's uniquely and best equipped to handle their specific needs in the cloud gaming space. While Microsoft brings a massive global brand into the fold. You stream Xbox games they get paid. You stream PlayStation games, they get paid. Feels like a nice boon for both companies, and makes too much sense the more I think about it.
there were plenty saying The writing was on the wall for consoles last Gen due to the rise of smartphones.... no one was supposed to want consoles.
Streaming platforms have terrible margins. Netflix makes less revenue than PlayStation, makes less profit than PlayStation, makes less profit per subscriber than PlayStation makes per console sold.
Netflix was first to market, had years of a monopoly, substituted large and problematic business models (video rental and cable). No game streaming service is going to have that advantage, or as wide as an appeal, so yes there are questions about the long term viability of a game streaming platform.
It'd be a $600 machine that would play all the games, you're still better off. I have no problem with the dreaded "always online" bit, it's coming sooner or later.
The choice and competition is in the software, I'd rather have one ok box to play stuff on than a crappy one a good one and a so-so one for different games.
I would love to know where this "one console future" idea came from and why some honestly think it would be great. Is it just a fanboy idea or...
You aren't looking at this the right way. Game streaming and an all-you-can-eat subscription service are not the same thing.
Game streaming is you buying a game (digitally) for $60 and not having to buy hardware to play it on.
Surely you meant to say a "no console future", because that's where this is headed.
If that's another way to say one machine for all the games, sure.
No one has presented an actual business model yet. Put me in the doubtful camp that streaming won't be tied to a subscription. Some kids Fortnite 4-5 hours a day. That's a lot of compute to give away for free.
That's why owning your own cloud is important. As is requiring Gold for multiplayer. And the revenue split for purchases. And a bunch of other things.
The soft sell works better than the hard sell for subscriptions. :)
I mean you've already priced it out of contention. If the sole existing console is $600 then it's DOA as a completely mass market machine and becomes more niche than ever. Regardless of software.
All the AAA's 1st party titles you love from MS and Sony, Gamepass, Xcloud, PS4 Pro, One X, Service initiatives etc are the result of competition and having to offer value to the consumer.
One console future is not impossible but it would not be all cotton candy and pixie sticks. It would not be in the best interest of consumers imo.
"All" the games would be a small fraction of the games you get now since Sony for example would have zero incentive to invest this heavily into first party products if they were the only competitor anyway. Many of the first party studios would get closed, thousands of people laid off, prices would rise since there is no more reason to keep them down or compete with one another. You are really, really, really not thinking this through.
There's plenty of multiplatform games that do perfectly fine without any 1st party nonsense. Put them all on the open market and the good ones will do fine thanks to that same competition, the hardware wars are a crutch, everyone is competing on software in the end.
If no one would buy it at $600 then they wouldn't be selling it at that price. Even if there isn't console competition, people have limited money to spend.
The "first party" studios would be fine making games on their own and selling them to a larger market. It's ridiculous to think that Naughty Dog's stuff wouldn't be doing even better if it was multiplatform or that they wouldn't get funding without Sony's sacred investment.
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Are people really talking about a one console future? Frankly, there are more gaming platforms available now when compared to only 10 years ago. I feel like it hasn't been this crowded since the early 90s.
Nobody is stoping other companys of joining in, but for some reason, you have some sort of biased against ps now.
You remind me of one user here who cant discuss VR without shit all over psvr.
You started off this response with a classic "well they said the same thing about x back in y" and I was like "okay yeah I can see that" and then you decided to say that Netflix isn't anywhere near as profitable as PlayStation, as if that really backs up the point "streaming platforms have terrible margins." You're saying Netflix makes less revenue than PlayStation like that makes sense. It doesn't. Netflix is not a game streaming platform. It's not even in the same fucking market as PlayStation.
Cloud computing has been a thing for a while. It's dominated enterprise environments where someone's job only exists in an application that was made for Windows XP. Recently we've seen an uptick in the ability to pool resources into a server farm and then build technology around it that allows people to do extremely complicated things - Like playing video games at high resolution and high frame rate from a data center that is hundreds of miles away.
This is exemplified by Stadia, Azure, and AWS. They understand that you can do a whole lot more with virtualization than just storing your vacation photos and legal documents. They realized that you can do more than just host a Linux instance that allows you to manage print queues.
And the best part is that they have realized this and built solutions to questions of "How do I play a game that look like it's running on a high end PC while I'm hundreds of miles away?" We are now entering a decade of virtualization of just about everything.
Why?
Because it makes way more cost sense to have virtualization. You don't need to build a pretty console with specs that you can't upgrade for 5-7 years. You can just go into the data center and hot swap the components, or even pool servers that aren't being used to increase the performance on the end user's screen.
The writing has been on the wall since the late 2000's and the wall is being written on more and more as time passes. This isn't a if, it's a when, and I guarantee it starts in 2020.
Netflix is not in in the same market and that's the point. Streaming Tv / movies has a much broader appeal, meaning less hurdles to scale enough to justify its infrastructure, uses a magnitude less in power and far less expensive technology to run, but still it doesn't actually make that much money.
Music went to streaming and artists are barely getting paid, movies/tv is going to streaming and the ubiquitous platform makes far less money than people think.
There's no golden example for how this all works in a healthy way. I understand what your saying in terms of it technically making sense.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I'm not saying it's going to fail, just that there are more hurdles than technical feasibility.
You are continuing to talk about cloud streaming as if it were inherently tied to a all-you-can-eat subscription. That is not the case. You understand that, right? Even if it requires a sub, that doesn't mean all you can eat.
Being able to stream a game doesn't mean it's tied into sub model like Game Pass. Sony and MS could offer the ability to stream any digital game you own if you're paying for Game Pass Ultimate or PS++.
It's very similar to how movies and TV shows are available on multiple different store fronts and can be purchased and streamed at any time but places like Amazon are offering the ability to do both purchases and an all you can eat sub with Prime. I expect Sony and MS to mimick Amazon in this regard. All games available to stream, not all games in the all you can eat sub.
That's not what this means... at all.
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I pay for Netflix every month and I have watched maybe two movies in the past two and a half months. The account allows for four subaccounts at 4K. Tiny sub that can be split several ways and there is no other way for Netflix to make more money off a subscription.
You now have free to play games that are hitting over $900 million off things like season passes for $9 every three months. There are a lot of ways in which games can make more money and unlike Netflix where you need new content almost every week, that is not something that applies to gaming.
I think it's reasonable to raise this concern, especially for Sony. And I have no doubt this point must have been raised several times during Sony's internal discussion on this matter. However, I think you will be missing to whole point of Microsoft's strategy as a company under the guide of Satya Nadella. Cloud computing is now the biggest driver of the growth for Microsoft. Investors believe Microsoft will live or die on its cloud department. Simply put, the cloud(Azure) is too big and too important for Microsoft's little Xbox department to mess it up. Microsoft can't play favorism to its gaming department because if it did, all the other Azure customers will surely notice because many choose Microsoft over Amazon over this exact same fear. And I think Microsoft is well aware of this fear and is known to capitalize on it.
Case in point, in this Bloomberg report:
I think it's easy to see why Microsoft has a strong incentive to not favor Xbox and undermine Sony in the cloud sector. It's this impartiality that gains Microsoft big bucks. I don't think they will forgo it any time soon, at least not until Microsoft beats Amazon in the cloud game.
Microsoft doesn't have to favor Xbox. The raw facts favor them, that's the issue. Xbox pays cost. Sony doesn't. That's the issue :/
Xbox pays cost for Azure services when they pay at all, which is a price without profit. Sony pays a higher price.
The Xbox division's usage of Azure is priced to cover the overhead/usage. Azure makes no money on Xbox's usage but it helps cover the fixed cost. Sony and all other third parties are priced so that MS makes money on their usage.
Xbox's usage of Azure does't negatively affect Azure's margins and in fact can help cover the fixed overhead. Azure doesn't lose money on Xbox using it and in fact its usage helps cover overhead, but they also don't make money.
Let's say that comparable usage from Xbox and PS costs $10. Azure charges Xbox $10 and breaks even. Azure charges PS $15 and makes money.
Hmm. I think by the end of next gen, we'll see some Xbox games on PS5, I think what they're doing with Nintendo they're also trying to do with Sony. MS seems to be pushing more towards focusing on having their software available across as many platforms as possible. I think they still focus on providing the most powerful hardware for those that want consoles, but I don't think they're going to be focusing on keeping their games exclusive.
Reposting from the other thread:
Assuming the PS5 and NextBox hardware are similar based on the idea that Sony will be using the Xcloud Xbox's in the Azure servers (incl secret sauce optimizations), does this mean 3rd party Asian developers won't have a reason to skip out on Xbox versions of games? The usual excuse that is given (from fans not devs) is that the Xbox userbase won't buy these Eastern games so the development time and cost for making an Xbox (and a lot of the time even PC) version isn't worth the effort. It makes sense, however now that the hardware (in at least the PSnow and Xcloud servers) is going to be so similar or possibly even bang on identical down to even the secret sauce, is it still worth the few lost sales even though the porting effort will be so minimal?
Surely in this scenario if the devs are making a PS5 version and assuming they don't have any exclusive deals, they have no real reason not to port the game to Xbox at the very least. We know from Microsoft's recent Windows updates that they're even trialling using Xbox executables on PC so the potential market for these devs will open up considerably with very little effort compared to before.
Assuming the PS5 and NextBox hardware are similar based on the idea that Sony will be using the Xcloud Xbox's in the Azure servers (incl secret sauce optimizations), does this mean 3rd party Asian developers won't have a reason to skip out on Xbox versions of games? The usual excuse that is given (from fans not devs) is that the Xbox userbase won't buy these Eastern games so the development time and cost for making an Xbox (and a lot of the time even PC) version isn't worth the effort. It makes sense, however now that the hardware (in at least the PSnow and Xcloud servers) is going to be so similar or possibly even bang on identical down to even the secret sauce, is it still worth the few lost sales even though the porting effort will be so minimal?
Surely in this scenario if the devs are making a PS5 version and assuming they don't have any exclusive deals, they have no real reason not to port the game to Xbox at the very least. We know from Microsoft's recent Windows updates that they're even trialling using Xbox executables on PC so the potential market for these devs will open up considerably with very little effort compared to before.
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