Well they're definitely still trying to change DRM. But there's no way whatever they're putting forward can undermine physical copies like before. If they apply the DRM to digital I'll be happy. Best of both worlds.

Likely just a surge from the announcement, it certainly wouldn't be cumulative so I wouldn't read too much into it.

Nothing serious. This is pretty common this late in the game, believe it or not. A number of 360 launch window games weren't built on final Xbox 360 specs.

Also, Respawn does a fantastic job in this video of, I think, explaining without confusion just what it is that the "Cloud" does for the Xbox One without any of the marketing buzzwords.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F8kI_kWIMk

"Basically, so Microsoft and Google have datacenters all over the world with tons of fast machines in them, and they can slice em up however they want, turn them into virtual machines, and then what they've done is they've exposed that in a very awesome way for Xbox One games. If you're in Connecticut and you want to play a game, we can say alright, well here's the datacenter you're going to because that's the closest one, you have a 30 ping to it, and there's no empty servers, let's spin one up for you in 5 seconds, and then off you go. We don't have to provision hardware, we don't have to go out and buy a bunch of servers and rack em in different places, it's just there, it's easy. It gets rid of all that fear and worry of how is this actually going to work. And dynamically allocated. We don't have to worry about where we place them, and do we need more servers, less servers, it just works. They give the specs, we code to those specs. Let's get crazy here and say it gets popular in Japan. If we didn't think it would get popular there, and we didn't buy a bunch of servers to put there, traditionally, we would be screwed. We love Australians, and we know they get screwed most of the time. This helps alleviate those problems."

Dynamic allocation of dedicated servers without the devs having to put in the kind of work or resources to support dedicated servers. They're just there waiting to be dynamically serviced to any number of potential users depending on when the need arises.

Likely just a surge from the announcement, it certainly wouldn't be cumulative so I wouldn't read too much into it.

Interesting that they can't use it for the pc's, they have to re-enginer for pc.

Interesting indeed, why can't they use the same MS servers for PC?

The same thing that made them change it in the first place: keeping their customers. They'll push online, with many of the same features, and as people adopt it they'll move in that direction.

Which really, is better for everyone.

Interesting indeed, why can't they use the same MS servers for PC?

This isn't anything revolutionary, cloud based compute platforms for dynamic allocation of virtual servers has been around a while. I'm sure Naughty Dog ran Uncharted multi-player off of Amazon's EC2 platform.

That Microsoft are leveraging Azure to make dynamic server allocation more accessible to game developers is a good thing, don't get me wrong but it's not a game changer. Most of the cloud talk has been them moving actual processing into the "cloud" rather than using it to spin up dedicated servers but it's surrounded by so much PR and counter-PR that genuine use-cases are being overlooked because they aren't as sexy as all this marketing fluff wants them to be.

What the fuck are you on about? What research? You best believe Microsoft saw some hard fucking data before they made this decision. People had "defected."

I think you're being a paranoid twit, or just looking for reasons to bash Microsoft. It's one or the other :D

Because it sounds better when the PR folks sling it. Read the papers on the client/server AI exchange. It's not that thrilling. It's not going to make all of your games look and play better. And that's what they want people to believe. And it's working to some degree. We've had people here believing in it. The 40-times-to-infinite scalability of the cloud! I think when you go so far to oversell something, you can start calling it PR nonsense.

Yes it has some nifty features. Azure is the most practical.