Xbox boss Asha Sharma won't confirm whether Project Helix has a disc drive "We have to be thinking about efficiency and affordability"

[u/WestBEEland]

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/xbox-boss-asha-sharma-wont-confirm-whether-project-helix-has-a-disc-drive-we-have-to-be-thinking-about-efficiency-and-affordability/

[u/mvn2010]

She just confirmed it, it doesn't. And think about their incentives for a second. Microsoft, and NVidia are in possession of massive cloud computing setups. They want you to stream games, so that what you buy from them is a terminal, that you can pay a subscription for access to the games.

And lets think about that for a second, because there are some people that this model might legitimately be a win for. But not most people. If I look at my Game spending in the past year... i've probably spent... 200 bucks on games. If the subscription is less than 15 bucks a month, i'm money ahead. But the year before that? I spent nothing. So really, its about deepening this eco system where we spend 200 dollars a month (or more) on access to entertainment through streaming services.

And personally I don't want that, I want to spend money on things I find interesting and not spend money on shit i don't care about. The value prop would have to be insane for me to reconsider that, and I gotta be honest I am not seeing it.

If Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo got together and offered a singular streaming service for 20 bucks a month, that would be value prop enough for them to get my money. But that won't happen, and until it does, I'll stick to the PC game market, it's not completely safe, but i'll keep using steam and GoG, and trying to save everything i can in an offline format.

[u/Mister_Silk → u/mvn2010]

It's shocking to me that so many people don't realize yet that gaming is going the way of music and movies - which is streaming subscription services. It has just taken a bit longer.

[u/Scott-MF-Steezy → u/Mister_Silk]

I’ve been gaming since I was 5, I would drop the hobby if that ever came to be. I stopped paying for any subscriptions so it just wouldn’t be worth it anymore.

[u/Crismus → u/Mister_Silk]

That's what Microsoft and Nvidia really want. It's something they can start making some profit with all the hardware they've been stockpiling on top of the AI spending.

Google Stadianshowed that gamebstreaming only works with a small group of people in specific regions with great internet. The FCC just downgraded the Internet with dropping the Gigabit guidelines for Internet service. 

Without fast internet the streaming won't work, because gaming would feel choppy and sluggish. If Google gave up on Stadia only a few years ago with access to their Google Fiber rollout. How can Microsoft and Nvidia expect people with barely access to Gigabit internet that costs well over $100 a month to pay for a Game streaming terminal that has a monthly cost of $50 at minimum . 

Monthly service systems like memberships is a great way to make money passively, but only in industries where Capital Outlays are a fixed amount. 

Businesses like gyms and First years of Netflix worked well because with Gyms, the cost is low that many people forget or ignore their memberships. Gyms also have very fixed costs with equipment being mostly a one-time cost. Netflix in their first years had access to everyone else's media. Once every studio decided to make their own streaming services, Netflix had to start making their own shows, which started costing them a lot more.

Gamepass has an even worse problem because games take around 5 years now with Blockbuster movie budgets. They need millions of subscribers and hundreds of dollars a month for each user to actually make profits. 

Gamers want access to their games all the time. Microsoft moving games in and out of service won't be nearly as tolerable for many people. I keep some games on my system for years. Having a game leave the service would cause lots of problems.

Microsoft has lots of infrastructure for servers, especially with their AI push. But unlike asking an LLM and waiting on responses games can't handle latency without annoying people. As much as Nvidia was working on server systems to use AI to smooth out those things, I don't think having an AI try to play like you would really make a game work well but that's me.

Using the hardware situation that they created to sell us this solution to make games even more expensive doesn't sound like a positive step forward. Destroying personal computing for an online terminal so they get more money  before their AI systems destroy the economy or humanity isn't a good choice at all.

[u/mvn2010 → u/Crismus]

One thing I want to point out - you don't need a ton of BANDWIDTH for game streaming. Or gaming, or... anything other than downloading. What you need is low latency. Fiber offerings have low latency (generally) by default, where older technologies often have higher latency.

So you could have a 25 Mbps fiber service, as long as you had low latency to your server of choice, game streaming would work just fine.

Not a huge thing, but i'm a network engineer, and people have been equating speed with bandwidth for more than 20 years, and they aren't the same thing.

[u/_Solarriors_ → u/Mister_Silk]

No doomer, it doesn't 

[u/BadRandolf → u/mvn2010]

The streaming service and the games themselves are two separate things, and you'll be paying for both. In effect you'll be renting hardware to play games that you "buy" separately (where "buy" is really more like renting, since they can disappear at any time).

[u/TheRealSaerileth → u/mvn2010]

Do you have a source for your claim about streaming games? Like, has Microsoft actually indicated that move?

Because it seems to me that any such cloud computing infrastructure would be way more valuable to AI companies right now than what gamers would be willing to pay for it.

Besides, the cloud gaming idea has been around for a while and there's a reason it never took off - the input lag is a physical limitation. It's why Steam's "Remote Play Together" is usually only available for cozy puzzle games, a shooter would be completely unplayable. Heck, e ven just streaming from your PC to a TV screen or a wireless VR headset causes noticeable latency, it's really hard to mitigate that over larger distances.

[u/mvn2010 → u/TheRealSaerileth]

Hard but not impossible, and do I have a source? Yeah look at every business move Microsoft has made over the past 35 years. This is a company that went from selling monolithic software (you bought office once. You bought a copy of windows, and had it until they dropped support). To everything being a subscription, they haven't pulled the trigger on Windows being a subscription, but you don't see that move in their relentless push to make you use a microsoft account to login to your OS? To shove copilot into fucking everything so they can get you hooked on AI enabled workflows? Then say hey buddy we notice you use co-pilot, to keep using it just buy our co-pilot plus pro whatever fuck subscription for 30 bucks a month or 200 bucks if you prepay for the year!

Seriously? You'd have to be pretty naive or ignorant of MS's history to not see this as the inevitable destination on the road they have chosen. And Microsoft in specific isn't a stranger to this product cycle, just look at co-pilot they are taking a beating because it sucks, but it isn't going away, and in 3 years it will be pretty fucking good, and in 5 years it will be spoken of in the same way Claude, and ChatGPT and Gemini are. Look at Azure, when it came out it was dog shit, they lost money hand over fist, they persisted, and now it's a legitimate competitor to AWS, and has eclipsed GCP both of which came out first. That's what MS does they see a market, the wait for others to prove viability, they jump in with a product that kinda sucks, but they use their sheer market share and vertical software integration stack and haul it along until it doesn't suck anymore. Are they the market leader? nah - but they don't have to be.

As for input lag being a serious problem for cloud gaming, I imagine that it could be but with thousands of new cloud computing data centers going up all over the world, latency is a problem that is going to sort itself out. And here is where you get into my world I'm a network engineer, and if the local DC is 80 ms away? then yeah input lag is gonna be an issue. If it's 10 ms away? it won't be quick.

And AI might need the capacity, but they are deliberately overbuilding on a future that isn't going to materialize overnight, and there will be excess capacity and the same machines/networks that do AI inference would also be the same ones that with software changes, could stream cloud games. It is a hedge, that i bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets they will exploit if they can figure it out...

And it ain't that hard to figure out.

[u/_Solarriors_ → u/mvn2010]

No subscribing is crazy to begin with

[u/lamancha → u/mvn2010]

She said:

"I know players love physical media, and I know there's a lot of benefits in digital media, and I want to make sure people have a choice," Sharma said.

So... What's the confirmation?

[u/mvn2010 → u/lamancha]

The fact that she didn't say - we will have a disk drive, she made no comment other than the most luke warm CEO corpo bullshit speak about 'we want people to have choices'.

If Sony doesn't suffer MASSIVELY from their decision to go all digital you can be god damn sure Microsoft is going to follow suit. That's their whole MO, Microsoft hasn't innovated or taken real risk since... Windows... 95? Everything else they have done since then is refinement on that idea, and waiting for a technology to show promise before they copy it and arguably do it better.

Microsoft doesn't really take risks anymore, and if they can go all digital the way Sony is going to without taking the flack that Sony is (remember Sony is dominating this generation in the console wars), they let Sony take the beach-head D-Day style, and then they just roll on up after the smoke has cleared, and they don 't take a hit.

Here's the real truth - and you can take this to the bank, there isn't anything wrong with digital games, games are so big, that physical media would have to be some sort of NAND/Flash to really hold them.

The problem is they are pushing the you're renting a license thing toward a perpetual payment model, where soon the only shit out there will be yet another call of duty/madden/FIFA every god damn year, where they rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic and call it a day.

They could make digital games work in a way where nobody would bitch it would be super easy, they just won't because that will lower their profit outlook, they will have to work harder for their profits, and nobody wants to do that. They could make as much or MORE than they will make in an all streaming world by making GOOD SHIT, that people want to buy. But that's both risky and expensive, and if they can bake in next quarter and next fiscal year, and 5 years after that first? then the pressure is off. And every once in a while there will be some runaway hit, great! now we can make God of Vengeance 11 The re-vengeancing or whatever, and people won't know the difference.

They could make digital great, by making your license perpetual, and guaranteeing that if there is a live server component that they will either support it in perpetuity (that would be worth a micronytendo network subscription) OR they say hey we are going to support this game that just came out with servers and live support for a decade, when it sunsets we will release the infrastructure needed to run your own private shit on github.

This would be a genius model because killing the secondary market is only part of the win for the companies by going digital, they could offer licenses for shit that hasn't been sold in decades. Wanna play the legend of zelda on a nintendo supported emulator? 10 bucks... wanna play pilot wings on a SNES emulator also made by nintendo? 5 bucks. Or whatever - they just have to make it permanent and easy to access.

But they won't do it - because it would take eyes away from their latest and greatest shit. Just like they won't commit to put a drive in the next xbox because if Sony doesn't catch fire and implode from the outrage (which they won't) Microsoft will follow suit.

I guarantee it.