Next gen, kiddies.
Microsoft is already gearing up for the next hardware gen. And, according to Brad Sams of Thurrott, that’s going to be a two-pronged approach.
Their next gen boxes, codenamed Scarlett, are naturally going to include a traditional console. But, in keeping with their idea that streaming is the future, their other box will be less powerful. Because it’s sole purpose is to stream those games.
Currently dubbed the Scarlett Cloud (wicked band name, by the way), it’ll be far less powerful than its sibling. As in, literally powerful enough to stream your game from cloud servers. Of course, it’ll also be cheaper to buy in the first place. That said, it’ll still be playing part of your game; it also has enough power to manage tasks such as collision detection, controller input, and image processing. But the rest of the usual game tasks get handled by the cloud. And Microsoft believes that ugh to be enough to crack the barrier when it comes to the latency problems of game streaming. This particular box is supposedly further ahead in development.
Naturally, they’ll be charging a fee for the service.
As for the other box, they actually have plans to work it so that games run on both devices. Supposedly, they’ve found a way around a lot of the hurdles to streaming; that’s why they’re pushing for the Cloud box. Granted, I’d argue their biggest hurdle is out of their hands, there. That being the patchy internet service infrastructure; and that’s just in the U.S.; it’s significantly worse in other countries.
Either way, none of this is set in stone, yet. They are still working on it, after all. And sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men…
Source: VG 24/7
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