@jeff microsoft is not "moving windows to the cloud"
windows has been in the cloud for businesses for years, they're just letting normal people use it soon.
for some of the shit that people like to do with their PCs, microsoft would never be able to feasibly move windows to the cloud without still having a local option. imagine every windows gamer and AI generator using windows over the cloud at once... it would be horrible.
imagine every windows gamer and AI generator using windows over the cloud at once… it would be horrible.
Microsoft has never been a company to shy away from boldly making bad decisions that last for years- and this one has precedent because Google tried to beat them to it. Yes, I can imagine Microsoft turning gaming itself into SaaS through datacenter rendering. They already have a vehicle to do it through gamepass, nvidia seems intent on pushing most of their business into the datacenter for profit margins, and it’s more control over an increasingly screwed crowd of users. Don’t like subscription computing for your games? “Buy an xbox.”
@beardalaxy @jeff I should maybe clarify that last bit is a nod at what MS did back when the Xbox One was announced with always-online connectivity. The response when asked about consumers who lived in areas with bad internet was something along the lines of “We have a product for those people, it’s called an Xbox 360.” It didn’t go over well.
@slash @jeff they are straying away from Xbox as a console, though, even going as far to say they lost the console war. And both Nvidia/Microsoft have streaming services, but how many people actually use them? If everyone was REQUIRED to use them it would be really bad and they would end up seeing less profit as well since a lot of people just can't stream that kind of stuff at an acceptable level. I've also seen Xbox servers really struggle when the player count gets high, and that is not even streaming, that's just a lot of very low data connections.
I think they could perhaps make the OS itself streaming but require actual storage space for things like games and have it directly play in an offline version of the OS that is stripped back or something, but that doesn't seem like it would be worth it to implement. Streaming a whole OS is either for super niche cases or turbo normies, so anyone doing anything more intensive than browsing the web with it will be a complete loss for MS if they ever went fully down that route.
I’m not saying anything about the arrangement wouldn’t be terrible, just that I wouldn’t put it past them. I’ve seen them try plenty before, like their attempt to walled garden everyone with UWP binaries that caused valve to respond with steamOS 1
even going as far to say they lost the console war.
This was probably affected by the recent lawsuit over the activision deal. Now that that’s settled, it remains to be seen if they continue that outward posture. Whatever their gains/losses on the consoles (which at this point it’s a question how they even count units per generation, everything is now so blurry between units that they can probably get whatever numbers they want) they are making a killing on the controllers, even from linux pc players like me. A good controller is a good controller.
their recent changes to minecraft is an example of more that is coming but for all of windows.
right, it'll just be all integrated in with your online Microsoft account. the actual computing power won't be moved to the cloud cloud will just be used to track what you're doing on your computer in real time. and 'sync' your files and settings.
@jeff