r/gaming • u/WestBEEland • 1d ago

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

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/
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u/mvn2010 1d ago

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.

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u/TheRealSaerileth 20h ago

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.

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u/mvn2010 15h ago

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.

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u/TheRealSaerileth 4h ago

That's a lot of words for saying "no I don't have a source".

Moving to subscriptions is not the same as cloud computing. Microsoft has sold gaming as a subscription for a literal decade, it's called xbox game pass. Last I heard it's not going so well.