How's it going with your solution to latency here? It's still an issue with many services we've seen already, so what kind of latency will we see on xCloud, and how are you going about minimising that?
Kareem Choudhry: From the data centres we have near Washington we're seeing really good latency - less than 10 milliseconds that's being added by the traversal to the cloud. Frankly we find more latency in the Bluetooth stack, connected to an Android phone. Part of what I get so excited about, having Azure as our first party cloud, is that I'm able to place hardware, regionally, as close to users as possible. When I talk to game developers, latency is something the industry has been dealing with for a long time, but they've always dealt with it from the multiplayer side. When I go and talk to creative game developers, especiallly in first party, is that they're going to take all those latency mitigation techniques that we apply on the multiplayer side and we're going to put them on the enduser input side. I think it's going to work out okay.
The other thing I've noticed is that consistency of latency is much more important than absolute latency, when it's very spiky. The human brain is actually an excellent latency compensator, and if we can use that to our advantage I think that'll be good.
What kind of connections will you be requiring for this?
Kareem Choudhry: We hope to get down to single digit mbps. I think some of the demos we've shown so far have probably gone down to nine, 10mbps. Some of the work that we're doing with Microsoft research, I think we'll be able to get a really good video feed probably around six to five.
At the moment you've got Xbox One S consoles in the data centre - how exactly does that work?
Kareem Choudhry: That's really a mechanical question - version one is go buy a console, take the plastic off and go put it in a data centre. That's what got us up and running, and obviously that happened quite some time ago. If you remember - let me back up, a data centre operating environment is very different to a home environment, and when we design a console for the home environment there's a bunch of things we take into consideration - power consumption, the acoustics, I spent a lot of years of my life recording the decibels of the fan from 10 feet away.
The other question would be why not Xbox One X consoles in there? Is that just because this is an early iteration?
Kareem Choudhry: I'd say a couple of things - one, we have a roadmap of what we're doing on the hardware side. But we just decided to start with Xbox One S for a couple of reasons. One was our first target being Android phones - we could send a 4K stream there, but probably 1080p, no-one's going to tell the difference. That was an easier place to get started, and frankly we wanted all our Xbox One X chips to go to consumers like yourself.
There's been a lot of excitement about the potential on Switch. What would it take to get xCloud working on Switch?
Kareem Choudhry: Well I've never developed on the Switch, for obvious reasons! So I'm not a good person to answer that question, but from an aspiration perspective, really I want to enable content on any device that has a screen and an input. We're starting on Android phones, but you could extrapolate where else we could go next - mobile phones is an obvious starting point. We spend a lot of time thinking about things like smart TVs, and other inputs.
How do services like GamePass sit alongside xCloud?
Kareem Choudhry: Obviously GamePass is our subscription service, it's really where we want to deliver great experiences and value to our customers. And right now it's a console product - we have aspirations to bring it to more users and more places. Project xCloud and GamePass are going to co-exist in some reasonable way.
A broader philosophical question - some people see cloud gaming as the death of console, or the start of it. Is it that extreme?
Kareem Choudhry: It's not that extreme at all! I've been building consoles for 15 years - we're not getting out of the console business, we spoke about it in our xCloud videos. We love our consoles, we love that business, and we're super proud to have the most powerful console out on the market place today and that leadership position we hope to retain going foward. And I also believe your best premium experience is going to be dedicated hardware running under your TV in your living room. It's an 'and' conversation, not an 'or' conversation. Everyone loves to jump to the death of consoles, and I think it makes a great headline, but we don't think that way at all.
