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Comment by ameen | Hacker News Reader

If this is true, there isn't going to be the announced "Family Share plan" or the "Disc-less" operation. Also, the fact that a few consoles might not be connected to the Internet means, MS can't really do cloud processing as it claimed (since it would lead to variable experiences of the same game).

I see this as a step-backward than a step ahead. Sure there will always be a vocal minority, but rather than provide them an alternative, they've just gimped an online console.

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I'm not super technical but I've always been skeptical of "cloud processing," especially after the Sim City debacle. Are there any scenarios where actually processing information on a server instead of on the user's home Xbox make sense, aside from things like WoW and Diablo III where you need to do the calculations on the server to make the multiplayer aspect fair?

I can't see many developers putting the time to offload calculations when they'd have to make the game work seamlessly with varying levels of latency or the servers becoming unavailable. Just look at how difficult it has been for games to utilize a handful of CPU cores. Microsoft's claims about the cloud remind me of ten years ago, when the .net label was being applied to everything they made and all software was somehow going to be delivered as web services. Plus I doubt MS is offering cloud server time to developers for free. Every service they provide to devs comes at a cost.

It makes sense for multiplayer games to not be hosted on arbitrary client boxes, but on some kind of neutral, low-latency "cloud" device (I know you said other than this, but I thought this was the biggest selling point for it in the first place).

It also makes sense for "complex" calculations. It's how stuff like Google search and Google maps works - you send the query, big machines chomp on the query and spit out a result, and your netbook doesn't have to go into overdrive trying to figure anything out. Basically anything that can take 100ms or so to complete could be moved off of the appliance and onto Microsoft servers. Why? Well, why not? Make some more room for rendering, I guess.

It'd be a slight step ahead for anyone with a persistant, reliable connection, but a drop-off-a-cliff for anyone else (a large part of the world). And that isn't even counting the implications for used games. I don't think they were ever going to be serious about that share plan either; there'd be too many abuses.

Edit: and also, as mentioned, reliable cloud processing was never in the cards since they were only ever going to require check-in once per 24 hour period.

The requirement was only that the console had to be connected to the internet once every 24 hours so I don't think that impacts their cloud efforts one way or another.

Not being able to play games without the disc in the tray is a major downside of the new policy though. Of course at least for me that means I will buy all Xbox One games digital going forward.

if cloud processing is an essential feature of the game then it would make sense to require an internet connection to run that game. Same as how nobody complains you can't play WOW offline.

What I think people objected to was a requirement across the entire console.

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