it's a hell of a lot more expensive to deliver gaming this way than on discs.
- Printing a disc containing dozens of hours of HD single player, co-op and online multiplayer gameplay costs less than $1.
- Delivering streaming HD gaming costs no less than $1 per hour so providing the same amount of gameplay as the disk, for argument's sake we'll peg at 30 hours, would cost $30 dollars.
Unless consumers suddenly decide they want to start paying a hell of a...
1) Anyone who has set up and used Citrix and VMWare environments know that this is just a tangle of problems waiting to happen, from lag, to dropped connections, etc.... Making it scalable and robust is a serious problem that vastly less demanding applications like those above have not solved. One that requires such high continuous bandwidth is going to be a nightmare.
2) It's bloody expensive to host something like this.
3) Their best bet is to sell it off to Comc...
Talking about their CryEngine 3 demo:
"The CE3 runs currently at more or less the same quality bar. I say more or less because the engine still optimizes itself to power of the platforms' intrinsics. So the PS3 will run slightly better here, it'll look and feel probably the same, but the engine is diverting computation needs to power subsystems available to the PS3, and the 360 differently, and PC differently"
Before people get too excited
1) h...
However, because this is a multiplatform engine, it doesn't mean the relative lack of detail in the 360 version of this demo is a limitation of the 360 hardware.
Some problems with the 360 version of this engine:
Worse draw-distance
Horrible LOD
Missing a lot of shadows
Simpler lighting (rays don't bounce)
Some textures worse
I hope they fix these issues. Chances are they built the engine on the PS3 and ported it to the 360. I d...
PS3 version is shown demoing more real-time lights (although this could just be what they chose to show rather than a limitation of the 360 version of the engine)
PS3 version has much better draw-distance and LOD which is demonstrated when they do a back to back comparison at 1:18 to 1:21 (360) and 1:22 to 1:26 (PS3)
Yet even the PS3 version is not noticably better than existing multiplatform games. The frame-rate and pop-in is just atrocious in both versions. It's...
are ISPs. 3rd party companies will fail if they try just as Netflix is doomed to falling to Comcast and Verizon VOD.
The idea itself is quite old. Just google server side rendering video games and you'll get the gist. However the problem has been the lack of a common, easily scalable hardware architecture and a seriously insufficient infrastructure. It was, and still is, far too expensive to make the slightest bit of sense.
BTW, a company called OTOY was demoing ...
of the very high cost of bandwidth. Imagine playing Crysis on the highest settings on the Wii! Absolutely nothing revolutionary about the idea but it will be a long time before it becomes viable.
have nothing to do with real or perceived console limitations. Plenty of console games look noticeably better than this demo despite facing the same hardware "limitations". The frame-rate of this demo is pretty poor as well. This is especially noticable where the small shack collapses.
Let's just acknowledge the harsh reality: This is just a poorly performing engine all around. They did a fine job building a PC engine but a poor job porting it over to consoles. It ...
Those do not look as good as many multiplatform games on the market today. They fare even worse when compared to platform exclusives.
The lesser RAM of consoles compared to PCs has absolutely nothing to do with the poor visuals of the CryEngine3 demo. Lots of existing games on 360 and PS3 easily outperform the demo.
My initial impression was from the small, low res video on IGN which appeared to show some decent lighting. A small video will hide poor textures and even poor geometry.
Now that I've seen in HD, it's clear that CryEngine 3.0 is simply not in the same class as existing multiplatform engines and certainly nowhere near the quality that certain exclusives are pumping out in terms of geometry, texture quality and filtering, lighting and even draw-distance.
See for yourse...
It's terrible when the main character has great bump-mapping but PS2 level polygon count. The environment geometry appears equally last-gen.
Since the Xenos GPU has massive geometry potential (which, if utilized, comes at the cost of pixel shading capacity) I doubt that's the bottleneck. My guess is that they are doing geometry on one of the CPU cores to reduce bandwidth requirements and improve texturing and pixel shading capacity. This would explain the unimpressive geometry...
Apart from the great hit response on the tree it looks like COD4/5 level at best in terms of geometry, real-time effects and lighting, textures, etc... Then again, that's pretty good for a multi-platform engine!
$160,000 is a pretty low price for targeted advertising to a captive audience.
Even that figure is probably well on the high side for all but the most high profile games since few games are likely to score 1 million downloads during the 30 day period during which the fee applies.
Having said that, free is always better. This is just Sony recuperating bandwidth costs and it's perfectly "fair". Why should any company host content for others for free?
is the fact that it provides a uniform online interface that works with all games. The importance of this from a usability standpoint cannot be underestimated. It also offers Netflix but that's not a significant draw because of all the problems with using Netflix such as but not limited to:
-Unreliable and poor video quality for many users (check out the forums)
-Outdated selection of movies and TV shows (check it out before you whine)
-Dependence on good will of IS...
As the proportion of 360s to PS3s decline with time it is not surprising that the delta in software sales percentage is decreasing but this line from the article caught my attention:
"Madden 09 sold approximately 500k more units than Madden 08, and the Playstation 3 version of Madden 09 sold approximately 630k more units than Madden 08, while the Xbox 360 figures stayed roughly the same (150k less). So that means that all of the new consumers went to the Playstation 3, not t...
Visuals: Infamous is visibly superior. Better textures, better lighting, better shadows, and much higher polygon count. This is a matter of numbers rather than taste and, clearly, Infamous easily wins.
Gameplay: Based on what little has been revealed about these games and both do an equally good job of turning ideas into gameplay, the concept behind Prototype is more interesting to me. Simply put, DNA absorption interests me more than shooting electricity. However, this is no...
The same argument could have been made for VHS over DVD. In fact, even today, the fastest growing segment of the US population prefer VHS over DVD and already own VHS players. Many also have TV's that are incompatible with most DVD players. They are only switching to DVD because of the lack of content and support.
IGN ought to be embarrassed. It's never a good sign to see a tech oriented magazine promoting obsolete technology over innovation.
1) The PC game market is shrinking in gaming marketshare and will continue to shrink. Heck, the PC market itself is plateauing. PCs as we know it will disappear. In the not too distant future people will laugh at that that gargantuan power hungry desktop the same way we laugh at the old brick-style cell-phones. This practically ensures that this company will only be moderately successful (if the product works and they have support, content and infrastructure to successfully scale).
...
Quoting myself from a different thread:
- Printing a disc containing dozens of hours of HD single player, co-op and online multiplayer gameplay costs less than $1.
- Delivering streaming HD gaming costs no less than $1 per hour so providing the same amount of gameplay as the disk, for argument's sake we'll peg at 30 hours, would cost $30 dollars.
Unless consumers suddenly decide they want to start paying a hell of a lot more for their games and internet ...