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[ThusZarathustra]

I think he has a point about the press not investigating MS' cloud claims.

This is the only bit with which I take issue. It is disingenuous in the extreme to expect the entertainment press to bite the hand that feeds. Not to mention the assumption that they somehow have the wherewithal to do so. Most of the so-called "games press" are PR shills who couldn't be expected to think their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone call a multi-national software and entertainment corporation on but one of the many ridiculous claims they've made over the years.

You're in the entertainment industry, Blow. C'mon now. This is how the game is played. You know better.

 

[Sandfox]

Also, who the fuck is going to pay for all of these servers?

Xbox Live subscribers.

 

[Amir0x]

Also, who the fuck is going to pay for all of these servers? MS out of the kindness of their heart?

"We are pleased to announce that a year long subscription to Xbox Live will cost the paradigm-shifting price of only $69.99 a year! With this, you gain access to the infinite power of cloud and 300,000 dedicated servers!"

 

[OrangeYouGlad]

Xbox Live subscribers.

I'd actually like to see a breakdown of what they use current live subs for. Considering we still have ads, it would be interesting to see where each dollar goes.

 

[mrklaw]

It is almost certainly either virtual servers, or they are quoting the entire azure infrastructure because in theory it would all be available and they're fudging the numbers. Or possibly target numbers for the end of the gen (no point having 300k online at launch)

There is no way they have 300k physical servers purely for Xbox one.

 

[marc^o^]

What "Journalistic Community" would you be referring too.

edit:

Also, who the fuck is going to pay for all of these servers? MS out of the kindness of their heart?

These servers exist already and can be used instead of staying iddle. That's a nice advertizing/reference for Azure, so I assume they will absorb a part of the cost as a promotion strategy. I also believe they will keep a paid online offering for the xbone, why wouldn't they?

 

[mrklaw]

What "Journalistic Community" would you be referring too.

edit:

Also, who the fuck is going to pay for all of these servers? MS out of the kindness of their heart?

Publishers wanting to take advantage of the infinite power of the cloud. And live subscribers. And possibly azure customers indirectly

 

[kitch9]

I think it's funny that some say that the PS4 and XB versions of games will be the same as devs will only code to the lowest machine.

The same devs who are supposedly going to wrestle with the cloud to make games infinitely awesome for Xbone.

 

[grumble]

This is the only bit with which I take issue. It is disingenuous in the extreme to expect the entertainment press to bite the hand that feeds. Not to mention the assumption that they somehow have the wherewithal to do so. Most of the so-called "games press" are PR shills who couldn't be expected to think their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone call a multi-national software and entertainment corporation on but one of the many ridiculous claims they've made over the years.

You're in the entertainment industry, Blow. C'mon now. This is how the game is played. You know better.

If that's really how it's done, then the gaming press shouldn't call themselves journalists. Maybe 'company-sponsored game informers'.

 

[whome0]

Sony Music Unlimited service is provided by Omnifone platform. Do they provide own cloud edge server infrastructure or are using common CDN delivery networks? Who do provide CDN services for Sony Video Unlimited service or PS+ cloud gamestate saves? I am pretty sure Sony is not interested in running CDN+Cloud appserver infrastructure. Better buy it from existing businesses (Amazon, Google, Akamai, Cloudfire etc...).

 

[ThusZarathustra]

If that's really how it's done, then the gaming press shouldn't call themselves journalists. Maybe 'company-sponsored game informers'.

I agree 100%.

There are maybe a dozen or two so-called games-journalists who truly deserve that title out of the hundreds (thousands?) who hide behind that banner on a blog or what have you. The rest are hobbiyist/sensationalist writers fighting over pageviews. Sorry if that's less glamorous or whatever, but's the truth.

 

[Dunlop]

I think he has a point about the press not investigating MS' cloud claims.

E3 had not happened yet, what exactly is there to investigate?
I see no evidence of a speed increase on my ps3 that would imply I am connected to the world fastest gaming network as Sony claims to be doing, should they be investigating that as well?

 

[zou]

What exactly is he wrong about? He didn't dispute that they may have 300,000 virtual servers, which is what you seem to be saying. He disputed that they have 300,000 physical servers, and I would do the same. Comparisons to Azure as a whole are weak, as Azure powers a hell of a lot more than just Xbox Live.

As I said before, what exactly is the reason for them to have 10 times the current number of servers sitting there on day one when a proportion of them will remain unused? Xbox Live usage isn't suddenly going to increse tenfold on launch day.


Yet you still posted in a thread about his opinion...

He's saying they are lying about the 300k, whether physical or virtual. He's saying the only way for Microsoft to get to 300k is by loading each server with hundreds or thousands of instances and counting those towards the total.

Which is obviously bullshit. There's no difference between physical and virtual machines on this scale. And as I wrote earlier, it's not even out of the question for Microsoft to set aside 300k physical servers.

And no, claiming "opinions" doesn't count. He's full of shit.

Edit: As for the reason: I know it's cool to hate on Microsoft for "the cloud, lol", but in their presentation they laid out their "vision" for the next xbox. So call me naive, but if they are going to push for devs to offload calculations/services to the cloud, it makes sense that they would need additional capacity.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

What "Journalistic Community" would you be referring too.

edit:

Also, who the fuck is going to pay for all of these servers? MS out of the kindness of their heart?

Yes?

It's called investing in your platform. MS already makes more than $1 billion a year on Azure, so if they're partnering with the Azure team they definitely have the money to build up the infrastructure, plus they're likely paying for it with Live subscription money as well.

They aren't building it out of the kindness of their heart. They're putting money into their servers so that developers have enough servers to use the platform. The goal is that developers will then use this system to create great games, which in turn sells the platform.

300k servers isn't that much of a stretch. When they install an Azure instance, they essentially have shipping containers that are filled with servers. Each container has 1,800-2,500 servers. This information is from 2010, so it's possible each container could have more servers now. Assuming that each container would have its maximum 2,500 servers, that's only 120 additional containers. If each instance only had the minimum 1,800 servers, that's still only 167 containers.

Neowin has pictures of the inside of these containers: http://www.neowin.net/news/live/09/11/17/inside-windows-azure-server-container

Considering each container takes 24 hours to install, MS only needs a few months to install these new servers. So again, 300,000 sounds like a lot, but with the way servers are installed in datacenters, it's not that much. I'm sure Azure has way more physical servers than that right now.

 

[grumble]

I agree 100%.

There are maybe a dozen or two so-called games-journalists who truly deserve that title out of the hundreds (thousands?) who hide behind that banner on a blog or what have you. The rest are hobbiyist/sensationalist writers fighting over pageviews. Sorry if that's less glamorous or whatever, but's the truth.

Real journalists have integrity. Some of the journalists put themselves in real danger to inform the public about issues that they perceive to be important, and will definitely challenge the organizations that are largely responsible for their financial wellbeing if there's something important to be said.

There are bullshit 'journalists' outside of the games community too.

 

[Kibbles]

Who the hell is Jonathan Blow?

 

[weekend_warrior]

"We are pleased to announce that a year long subscription to Xbox Live will cost the paradigm-shifting price of only $69.99 a year! With this, you gain access to the infinite power of cloud and 300,000 dedicated servers!"

$70 a year? Not a chance. I expect nothing less then $14.99/month. They'll spin it by saying "For less then 50 cents a day!..."

 

[Godslay]

@ 2MF, This is a response I posted in another similar thread in regards to this topic. Now before every says LOL@MS Research. Be aware this is completely disconnected from any PR within MS, it's in concert with a researcher at University of California, and is connected back to ACM. The research is legit. I will temper my expectations with the caveat that it is in a lab setting. Real networking conditions maybe more harsh and less tolerant. Even with that said it is promising because of this one little statement:

To explore this approach, we develop an improved AI for tactical navigation, a challenging task to offload because it is highly sensitive to latency. Our improvement is based on calculating influence fields, partitioned into server-side and client-side components by means of a Taylor series approximation. Experiments on a Quake-based prototype demonstrate that this approach can substantially improve the AI’s abilities, even with server-clientserver latencies up to one second.

This is the paper I was referring to:

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/72894/NOSSDAV2007.pdf

More complete conclusion:

Due to our unfamiliarity with available MMOG code bases [7,8],
we evaluate the above mechanism in an open-source first-personshooter (FPS) game, specifically Quake III. Although FPS games
are quite different from MMOGs in many respects, the basic game
loop and combat AI logic are very similar [1,19].
We built a prototype implementation of partitioned AI inside
Quake III’s bot code. We employ Quake III’s standard AI [21]
for every aspect of bot control except the direction of motion,
which we determine by a Taylor-approximate influence field.
Notably, we did not modify the target-selection logic or shooting
accuracy.

In this paper, we propose enhancing the AI of game servers by
offloading computation to clients. To address the problem of
latency, we partition each computation into a critical tight-loop
server-side AI and an advice-giving client-side AI. As an
exemplar, we design an enhanced AI for tactical navigation based
on influence fields, and we partition it using Taylor series
approximation. Prototype experiments show substantial
improvement in AI abilities, even with round-trip latencies up to
one second.

A further step with our prototype is to replicate the client-side AI
and test its ability to deal with client failure. Another step is to
add a local fallback mode to the server-side AI and investigate the
transition between advised and unadvised AI behavior. A minor
but practically important improvement is to execute the client-side
AI on a low-priority thread, to ensure that it does not disturb the
gameplay of the user on the client machine. Moreover, we would
like to implement partitioned AI in an MMOG and conduct a user
study to see whether it improves the game as we expect.
One aspect of client exploitation we did not consider is
information leakage, in which clients inspect glimpses from the
server to learn details of game state they should not be allowed to
observe. We would like to investigate anonymization and
obfuscation techniques to limit client visibility into offloaded
computations.

 

[Danielsan]

All this Jonathan Blow hate is so tiresome. "How dare he have well substantiated opinions, that incredible pretentious man!"

And yes, clearly the man who has been incredibly vocal about his extremely negative experience of working with Microsoft on publishing Braid on XBLA since the game's release, is now simply shitting on Microsoft because he has a vendetta and is in bed with Sony. Not because he simply thinks all this horseshit about infinite power through the cloud is consumer misleading drivel. Sure he now has a minor stake in the PS4 with his game releasing on the platform, but don't kid yourself, if or when Sony slips up by flat out lying to the consumer I have no doubt that Blow will be just as opinionated.

 

[ThusZarathustra]

He's saying they are lying about the 300k, whether physical or virtual. He's saying the only way for Microsoft to get to 300k is by loading each server with hundreds or thousands of instances and counting those towards the total.

Which is obviously bullshit. There's no difference between physical and virtual machines on this scale. And as I wrote earlier, it's not even out of the question for Microsoft to set aside 300k physical servers.

And no, claiming "opinions" doesn't count. He's full of shit.

These were not his claims, and you do the community a disservice by claiming them to be such.

You are either lacking in reading comprehension re: his statements or you are willfully misinterpreting them. Neither is excusable. Anyone claiming that his issue is the 300,000 servers number is either lying or obfuscating. The number of servers is not the issue. As Blow himself stated, it's easy enough from a logistical perspectrive to get thousands and thousands of servers (virtual or otherwise) up and running relatively quickly. Again, this is not the issue and anyone claiming that it is is lying or obfuscating.

The issue is whether those servers could do anything functionally useful for the end user. The issue is whether or not those servers could usefully, in a real-world (not an on paper) situation, provide computational support for the user-base at large and be worth the trade-off of daily DRM checks. This is real issue, not the fucking number.

Real journalists have integrity. Some of the journalists put themselves in real danger to inform the public about issues that they perceive to be important, and will definitely challenge the organizations that are largely responsible for their financial wellbeing if there's something important to be said.

There are bullshit 'journalists' outside of the games community too.

I... don't think I said anything that contradicts your points here... so... I agree? (I'm not sure I understand where the challenging, standoffish tone of your comment was coming from.)

 

[RukusProvider]

He could always contact MS and setup a time for a Datacenter tour, learn the architecture and then comment.

 

[KHarvey16]

"How dare he have well substantiated opinions...

No one has criticized Jonathan Blow for having a well substantiated opinion, I can guarantee you that.

 

[Bomber Bob]

I don't understand why people even think think him shitting on MS is going to help Sony

Sony pushing ps4 on the indi comunity

 

[watership]

All this Jonathan Blow hate is so tiresome. "How dare he have well substantiated opinions, that incredible pretentious man!"

And yes, clearly the man who has been incredibly vocal about his extremely negative experience of working with Microsoft on publishing Braid on XBLA since the game's release, is now simply shitting on Microsoft because he has a vendetta and is in bed with Sony. Not because he simply thinks all this horseshit about infinite power through the cloud is consumer misleading drivel. Sure he now has a minor stake in the PS4 with his game releasing on the platform, but don't kid yourself, if or when Sony slips up by flat out lying to the consumer I have no doubt that Blow will be just as opinionated.

Before his game ships? I doubt it.

 

[ThusZarathustra]

He could always contact MS and setup a time for a Datacenter tour, learn the architecture and then comment.

1) A tour of a datacenter would tell you very little. They're servers. They're all basically the same.

2) The number of physical servers in place at large across datacenters will also tell you very little. They can be virtualized and balanced to compensate for the actual number. The number is largely irrelevant and is in place to be a talking point, not a logistical fact.

3) The real issue is computational time and latency issues, along with availability/value of server resources to devs at large. In ten years time, software design may be able to take into account dedicated off-site processing for any and every one, but we're far far from that time in the mainstream video games market as it stands.

 

[Willy Wanka]

300,000 servers sounded like bullshit as soon as they said it. They made it sound like it was 300,000 physical servers.

Sorry but this post made me laugh as the other day you said in another thread that Gaikai maybe had more.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=59291537&postcount=32

Maybe you were being facetious but it didn't seem like it at the time.

 

[Miles Quaritch]

Does Gaikai have 300k servers? Surprising.

 

[Four_Chamber]

Sorry but this post made me laugh as the other day you said in another thread that Gaikai maybe had more.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=59291537&postcount=32

Maybe you were being facetious but it didn't seem like it at the time.

Gaikai having more than Microsoft? Laughable man

 

[Whipped Spartan]

Who the hell is Jonathan Blow?

Guy that made Braid a XBLA game from years ago that had some success. Now of course he spends his time being an internet cool guy.

 

[Godslay]

Gaikai having more than Microsoft? Laughable man

Yeah, Gaikai isn't anywhere close. MS has been building datacenters for a long time now. Conservative estimates put them at ~200k in 2008. They've had some big datacenters role out since then. They are big players.

 

[GoofsterStud]

Microsoft invested a lot in Azure. It didn't take off like they wanted. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a lot of machines just sitting there that they use to meet the quota.

 

[Miles Quaritch]

Gaikai having more than Microsoft? Laughable man

Maybe he meant virtual servers?

 

[codhand]

Yeah, Gaikai isn't anywhere close. MS has been building datacenters for a long time now. Conservative estimates put them at ~200k in 2008. They've had some big datacenters role out since then. They are big players.

gakai isnt anywhere close to what?

gakai is a not fully explained service from sony, just like 'the cloud' is some unexplained service from MS, except in MS's case the service is even less outlined than in the case of gakai.

 

[anx10us]

Yes?

It's called investing in your platform. MS already makes more than $1 billion a year on Azure, so if they're partnering with the Azure team they definitely have the money to build up the infrastructure, plus they're likely paying for it with Live subscription money as well.

They aren't building it out of the kindness of their heart. They're putting money into their servers so that developers have enough servers to use the platform. The goal is that developers will then use this system to create great games, which in turn sells the platform.

300k servers isn't that much of a stretch. When they install an Azure instance, they essentially have shipping containers that are filled with servers. Each container has 1,800-2,500 servers. This information is from 2010, so it's possible each container could have more servers now. Assuming that each container would have its maximum 2,500 servers, that's only 120 additional containers. If each instance only had the minimum 1,800 servers, that's still only 167 containers.

Neowin has pictures of the inside of these containers: http://www.neowin.net/news/live/09/11/17/inside-windows-azure-server-container

Considering each container takes 24 hours to install, MS only needs a few months to install these new servers. So again, 300,000 sounds like a lot, but with the way servers are installed in datacenters, it's not that much. I'm sure Azure has way more physical servers than that right now.

What does "makes" mean ? Revenue ? Profit ? Source please ...

 

[JaggedSac]

Microsoft invested a lot in Azure. It didn't take off like they wanted. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a lot of machines just sitting there that they use to meet the quota.

What? It is their latest billion dollar business and is growing quite well. One of the bright spots on their earnings report.

 

[Godslay]

gakai isnt anywhere close to what? gakai is a not fully explained service from sony, just like the cloud is some unexplained service from MS, except in MS's case the service is even less outlined than in the case of gakai.

The amount of physical servers. They likely won't release a number detailing how many they have. It's pretty standard not to know the exact number of servers a company has. Even with that said, I don't think Gaikai has outpaced MS in bring datacenters (aka servers) online. Plus they had to play catch up to start.

As far as the actual services themselves, yeah I never claimed one was superior to the other in terms of what they actually will offer the customer as a service. Because as you said, no one has details.

 

[Zen]

Guy that made Braid a XBLA game from years ago that had some success. Now of course he spends his time being an internet cool guy.

*Spits out water* Braid had more than 'some success' and he's working on a new game right now.

 

[GoofsterStud]

What? It is their latest billion dollar business and is growing quite well. One of the bright spots on their earnings report.

One billion is only a sign of progress in attempting to defeat the Amazon Cloud. That was the goal, that was what they bet on. That did not happening. While it still is great from an earning standpoint, it failed to meet expectations.

Sure it's progress, but it's a let down compared to the original goal.

>.>

 

[SenjutsuSage]

To be completely honest, all I see is a developer that has had himself a good deal of success and is now incredibly full of himself.

 

[Fusebox]

Not sure why some people are suggesting there's no difference between physical and virtual servers.


If I told you guys I could host your service at my place where I have 1000 servers and you turned up and it was 1000 virtual machines on a single hardware server you should have the common sense to be pissed at me.

 

[KHarvey16]

Not sure why some people are suggesting there's no difference between physical and virtual servers.


If I told you guys I could host your service at my place where I have 1000 servers and you turned up and it was 1000 virtual machines on a single hardware server you should have the common sense to be pissed at me.

But either you can host the service or you can't. If I need 1000 servers and you meet my needs with some magic machine that runs 1000 instances, more power to you! I suspect you would save me a lot of money.

 

[JaggedSac]

One billion is only a sign of progress in attempting to defeat the Amazon Cloud. That was the goal, that was what they bet on. That did not happening. While it still is great from an earning standpoint, it failed to meet expectations.

Sure it's progress, but it's a let down compared to the original goal.

>.>

Yeah, I'm sure unseating the 9 year enterprise entrenched leader in 3 years was their goal.

 

[Sentenza]

So, reading this thread I'm learning that people who are ready to believe and defend Microsoft's hilarious claims about how the cloud will increase XB1's computational power actually exist...

"Oh, look, someone is calling bullshit on bullshit, he must be biased toward MS".

 

[oVerde]

He want so bad dat golden PsOne.

 

[Klocker]

He's saying they are lying about the 300k, whether physical or virtual. He's saying the only way for Microsoft to get to 300k is by loading each server with hundreds or thousands of instances and counting those towards the total.

Which is obviously bullshit. There's no difference between physical and virtual machines on this scale. And as I wrote earlier, it's not even out of the question for Microsoft to set aside 300k physical servers.

And no, claiming "opinions" doesn't count. He's full of shit.

Edit: As for the reason: I know it's cool to hate on Microsoft for "the cloud, lol", but in their presentation they laid out their "vision" for the next xbox. So call me naive, but if they are going to push for devs to offload calculations/services to the cloud, it makes sense that they would need additional capacity.

exactly

people continue to act as if they pulled this out of their ass after they saw the Sony deal ...hardly, this has been their focus from the beginning of what has become ONE, to shift away from static reintroduced consoles and eventually make the eco system play games on many devices, IMO

 

[Desty]

Xbox Live subscribers.

Xbox Live subscribers should be charged more based on how much their current game utilizes the cloud resources. It's the only fair way.

 

[hey_it's_that_dog]

But either you can host the service or you can't. If I need 1000 servers and you meet my needs with some magic machine that runs 1000 instances, more power to you! I suspect you would save me a lot of money.

This is true, but as a PR bullet point or whatever, only a number of actual servers is meaningful. If they're talking about virtual servers, then the number 300,000 is not an achievement or feature or whatever they're trying to pass it off as. It's arbitrary.

Maybe it's dumb to get hung up on a talking point about servers in the first place, but if MS are making substantive claims about features based on their server capacity, it seems reasonable to treat it like an important fact. If they can do what they claim, I don't care whether the servers are real or virtual. Blow probably feels the same way, but it sounds like he doubts that they can do what they claim.

 

[KHarvey16]

This is true, but as a PR bullet point or whatever, only a number of actual servers is meaningful. If they're talking about virtual servers, then the number 300,000 is not an achievement or feature or whatever they're trying to pass it off as. It's arbitrary.

Maybe it's dumb to get hung up on a talking point about servers in the first place, but if MS are making substantive claims about features based on their server capacity, it seems reasonable to treat it like an important fact.

I think what it really comes down to is: what is the difference between 300,000 physical servers that accomplish the task or 300,000 virtual servers that accomplish the task?

 

[Godslay]

This is true, but as a PR bullet point or whatever, only a number of actual servers is meaningful. If they're talking about virtual servers, then the number 300,000 is not an achievement or feature or whatever they're trying to pass it off as. It's arbitrary.

Maybe it's dumb to get hung up on a talking point about servers in the first place, but if MS are making substantive claims about features based on their server capacity, it seems reasonable to treat it like an important fact. If they can do what they claim, I don't care whether the servers are real or virtual. Blow probably feels the same way, but it sounds like he doubts that they can do what they claim.

Well at the minimum we know that there are 15k physical servers. That's the baseline. They recently opened a 300k physical server datacenter in Chicago, and have one planned in Cheyenne, as well as various spots around the world, they are growing the infrastructure. It could very well be 300k servers spread out, and who knows how many virtual servers. Or it could be 300k virtual, spread out over 15k+ servers. I'm intrigued to find out what exactly they are planning, if we ever find out.

 

[Sentenza]

I think what it really comes down to is: what is the difference between 300,000 physical servers that accomplish the task or 300,000 virtual servers that accomplish the task?

The main issue is that no matter the amount of servers, some of the task they are claiming to off-load "on the cloud" are just bullshit.

"Lag for lighting is not that important so we could that with the cloud, you know".
Really? How?
Please, explain to me this technical process where you render a simpler scene with your local hardware and then you use the magic cloud for calculating lighting and adding it on top of the previous render, without suffering any latency-related issue (like that, as if dynamic lighting was just a post-processing filter).

Jesus Christ if people isn't gullible when it comes to marketing bullshit these days.