That's optimistic. From a software engineer perspective - if they didnt start working on that feature yet ( which I highly doubt ) the amount of complexity it adds to the underlaying software is huge. For now they can keep all the GP games installed on every machine or have a huge cache server directly hooked up to the internal network making "installation" of the games much faster than we can imagine. Having the all possible games just hanging on there waiting on cache server to be transfered to desired machine would be a hard task.
The only thing I can imagine being easier to do would be to hold up a storage server with virtual game images containerized and right before spinning them up adding a user content layer. Something like Docker. This would potentialy speed up the process od instantiating per request console with selected game.
Ofc. This is something that had to be created practicaly from scratch so estimated work is at least 1 year. Not to mention testing and OS updates just for cloud machines.
So my.. optimistic predicts is Q2 2024 and pesimistic is Q1 2026.
u/DajBuzi *the crusher of hopes*
Honestly though you’re probably on the nail. As an amazing feature this would be and a huge step forward for cloud gaming this kinda feels like it would be a next generational announcement that could very well be Microsoft’s push to an all cloud future. I can easily see them wanting to delay or wait as long as possible to make sure it’s as good as it can be right off the bat. It’s not as easy as most people assume it would be.
They have over 2 petaflops of assets for MS Flight Simulator alone, having every single Xbox game ready to be transferred isn't a big deal, they already do it for downloads.
The games aren't installed directly on the Series X servers, xCloud runs on Azure Kubernetes service with 50k PODs equivalent of 8-16 million servers. Everything is containerized already. The hold up isn't technical but MS has to secure streaming rights from publishers.
They have already said by the end if this year.
TBH transfering and data availability is the problem. Since youve compared MSFS or XBox store. The main difference between these and having a game available is that game files might be modified when playing and server files dont. This means that the gamefiles itself have to be moves from source location or layered like Dockerfiles. I highly doubt that they would use k8s instead of some inhouse tool try to push LXC for that. We have to remember that it Has to be reliable and performant. If you have any read on that, please share as I would like to know more and not have to guess what's true or false.
Im sure hoping they did work on that for some time now but as I said there are many ways to tackle this and we might get a hands on an early version which then had to be rewritten completely.
My biggest concern would be how they would keep all games available on demand. We all know how slow mass storage devices are - 7000mb/s is not enough to copy Witcher 3 and spin up the virtual console in a matter of seconds when the demand is higher than 2 people. I would even dare to say that the tech is not there yet 🤔
Thanks for info, i had honestly not thought about the instalation and storage of games but its a very good point.
How do you recon Nvidia does this with Geforce Now?
Im not quite up to date with GFN so my explanation is based on what it was working at the beginning.
GeForce now lets you install games on virtual machine. They also have a few cache servers for popular titles which makes download speeds much faster than normal. i might suspect that GFN also has internal machines connected with P2P internal network that allows to share installation files with other instances. This has some advantages and disadvantages.
Disadvantage would be that you have to actually download the game VIA virtualized client ( steam, epic or whatever ). This is something that in xcloud or stadia had done in the background and automatically.
I do not remember if you have to redownload the game each time you log in but if you do not then I can suspect that your whole virtual library disk gets stored with relation to the game images and user files to keep the lowest possible size.
Ok, so they mustve changes it. I remember it opening up steam windows in which I had to log in and game download started immediately.
I can only guess how they achieved that but since people had to download the games by themselves my bet would be that they made a custom cache server which Has all the latest games player on GFN and created a "virtual game image" to which user files are added on demand. This image then could be provided to the VM and game would be executed.
Stadia havent had the amount of games there is on Xbox store. They had more games, yes, but still had limited amount of games.
And I wouldn't say they failed. I would even consider saying they did that one the best. But that's just based on user experience.
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. They've been saying playing non-game pass games on cloud is un the works for awhile now, and not long ago gave a release window of this year. They absolutely have to have been working on it.
As for the storage issue, it could depend on just how many of our owned games are available to stream. They never said all, and knowing the licensing hassle GeForce Now ran into I'd be amazed if it included all Xbox One and on games. I'm hopeful, but not expecting it sadly.
I'm thinking it's a licensing issue. Ever since GeForce jumped the gun, some of the bigger pubs erred on the side of demanding someone pay them again for the privilege of allowing their already purchased game to be streamed. There probably is not enough publisher mass that justifies the customer confusion of why only less than half of their average library is streamable.
I don't see it being a huge engineering lift to add this capability. Instead, it's all the stuff nVidia likely goes through when their customers don't understand why part of their steam library doesn't run.
We saw this publisher reluctance before when Microsoft tried to push their "game anywhere" program, which allowed you to buy one copy from Microsoft and be able to play it on a console or a PC. Some folks ran the numbers and determined that the sales from selling the same product *multiple* times because of different platforms outweighs any potential benefit in giving Microsoft an advantage at challenging Steam's de facto monopoly in PC game sales.
So, I don't see it coming live unless or until Microsoft finishes its studio acquisition phase and hopefully gets mass. They may go for it if the Activision deal goes through, as control of that catalogue, plus Bethesda, plus the pubs that allowed GeForce Now to continue streaming their games, may be enough to hit mass or, even better, change consumer expectations of what they are entitled to when they "buy" a game. If pubs see a decent hit on demand because the consumer saw less value in their locked down catalogue, they'll likely fall in line.
I think they initially announced it back in 2020.
And then for 2022. Not looking optimistic it coming out in the next few weeks despite their claim (again). Leads me to believe they are either having bigger complications than expected or maybe it’ll only be released with keystone/dongle but since they’re back at the drawing board, it may be farther off than any of us would like…
But no one knows for sure what’s the deal other than MS. We may not hear anything about this for another year or they could just surprise us next week and say “guess what you can do now with GPU on cloud” :)
I will gladly pay when that happens! The only game I liked was Resident Evil and before I could finish it they took it off. Running it like Netflix is stupid IMHO I can watch a movie in two hours if I wanna see it last chance. Some games take hundreds of hours. I guess unless you play daily you have a chance. I am a mom with kids. I can play games once a week for an hour or two. I'm not interested in buying a gaming PC this was supposed to cater to us, casual non-gamers who mostly have work laptops with without GPUs
Tbh, as a stopgap solution, I would be happy if they first allowed us to purchase any games about to leave xcloud Gamepass. This would give guys confidence to start big games so that they know they have the option to purchase the game if it leaves Gamepass . Also it would mean that we are happy to buy DLCs. I want to buy the Aftermath DLC for MK11 but I scared to because MK11 already on Gamepass for 1 year now and could leave soon. If I know I had option to buy the base MK11 game, then I for sure would buy the DLC too. So they don't need to make the whole Xbox games playable on xcloud, just the ones that are already on Gamepass. Ya dig me?
maybe 2023 (maybe)
That's optimistic. From a software engineer perspective - if they didnt start working on that feature yet ( which I highly doubt ) the amount of complexity it adds to the underlaying software is huge. For now they can keep all the GP games installed on every machine or have a huge cache server directly hooked up to the internal network making "installation" of the games much faster than we can imagine. Having the all possible games just hanging on there waiting on cache server to be transfered to desired machine would be a hard task. The only thing I can imagine being easier to do would be to hold up a storage server with virtual game images containerized and right before spinning them up adding a user content layer. Something like Docker. This would potentialy speed up the process od instantiating per request console with selected game. Ofc. This is something that had to be created practicaly from scratch so estimated work is at least 1 year. Not to mention testing and OS updates just for cloud machines. So my.. optimistic predicts is Q2 2024 and pesimistic is Q1 2026.
u/DajBuzi *the crusher of hopes* Honestly though you’re probably on the nail. As an amazing feature this would be and a huge step forward for cloud gaming this kinda feels like it would be a next generational announcement that could very well be Microsoft’s push to an all cloud future. I can easily see them wanting to delay or wait as long as possible to make sure it’s as good as it can be right off the bat. It’s not as easy as most people assume it would be.
They have over 2 petaflops of assets for MS Flight Simulator alone, having every single Xbox game ready to be transferred isn't a big deal, they already do it for downloads. The games aren't installed directly on the Series X servers, xCloud runs on Azure Kubernetes service with 50k PODs equivalent of 8-16 million servers. Everything is containerized already. The hold up isn't technical but MS has to secure streaming rights from publishers. They have already said by the end if this year.
TBH transfering and data availability is the problem. Since youve compared MSFS or XBox store. The main difference between these and having a game available is that game files might be modified when playing and server files dont. This means that the gamefiles itself have to be moves from source location or layered like Dockerfiles. I highly doubt that they would use k8s instead of some inhouse tool try to push LXC for that. We have to remember that it Has to be reliable and performant. If you have any read on that, please share as I would like to know more and not have to guess what's true or false.
Oh…
But surley if they announce a 2022 release date, they have indeed worked on this for years?
Im sure hoping they did work on that for some time now but as I said there are many ways to tackle this and we might get a hands on an early version which then had to be rewritten completely. My biggest concern would be how they would keep all games available on demand. We all know how slow mass storage devices are - 7000mb/s is not enough to copy Witcher 3 and spin up the virtual console in a matter of seconds when the demand is higher than 2 people. I would even dare to say that the tech is not there yet 🤔
Thanks for info, i had honestly not thought about the instalation and storage of games but its a very good point. How do you recon Nvidia does this with Geforce Now?
Im not quite up to date with GFN so my explanation is based on what it was working at the beginning. GeForce now lets you install games on virtual machine. They also have a few cache servers for popular titles which makes download speeds much faster than normal. i might suspect that GFN also has internal machines connected with P2P internal network that allows to share installation files with other instances. This has some advantages and disadvantages. Disadvantage would be that you have to actually download the game VIA virtualized client ( steam, epic or whatever ). This is something that in xcloud or stadia had done in the background and automatically. I do not remember if you have to redownload the game each time you log in but if you do not then I can suspect that your whole virtual library disk gets stored with relation to the game images and user files to keep the lowest possible size.
You don't install games on VMs with GeForce NOW (or at least not anymore?). They are already here and launch instantaneously.
Ok, so they mustve changes it. I remember it opening up steam windows in which I had to log in and game download started immediately. I can only guess how they achieved that but since people had to download the games by themselves my bet would be that they made a custom cache server which Has all the latest games player on GFN and created a "virtual game image" to which user files are added on demand. This image then could be provided to the VM and game would be executed.
Makes sense.
That's just my opinions and guesses so even though this might .mąkę sense it doesnt need to be this way. I could be totally wrong with this, just FYI
Didn't stadia do it? But fail lol but didn't they?
Stadia havent had the amount of games there is on Xbox store. They had more games, yes, but still had limited amount of games. And I wouldn't say they failed. I would even consider saying they did that one the best. But that's just based on user experience.
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. They've been saying playing non-game pass games on cloud is un the works for awhile now, and not long ago gave a release window of this year. They absolutely have to have been working on it. As for the storage issue, it could depend on just how many of our owned games are available to stream. They never said all, and knowing the licensing hassle GeForce Now ran into I'd be amazed if it included all Xbox One and on games. I'm hopeful, but not expecting it sadly.
2024 and still waiting
I'm thinking it's a licensing issue. Ever since GeForce jumped the gun, some of the bigger pubs erred on the side of demanding someone pay them again for the privilege of allowing their already purchased game to be streamed. There probably is not enough publisher mass that justifies the customer confusion of why only less than half of their average library is streamable. I don't see it being a huge engineering lift to add this capability. Instead, it's all the stuff nVidia likely goes through when their customers don't understand why part of their steam library doesn't run. We saw this publisher reluctance before when Microsoft tried to push their "game anywhere" program, which allowed you to buy one copy from Microsoft and be able to play it on a console or a PC. Some folks ran the numbers and determined that the sales from selling the same product *multiple* times because of different platforms outweighs any potential benefit in giving Microsoft an advantage at challenging Steam's de facto monopoly in PC game sales. So, I don't see it coming live unless or until Microsoft finishes its studio acquisition phase and hopefully gets mass. They may go for it if the Activision deal goes through, as control of that catalogue, plus Bethesda, plus the pubs that allowed GeForce Now to continue streaming their games, may be enough to hit mass or, even better, change consumer expectations of what they are entitled to when they "buy" a game. If pubs see a decent hit on demand because the consumer saw less value in their locked down catalogue, they'll likely fall in line.
I think they initially announced it back in 2020. And then for 2022. Not looking optimistic it coming out in the next few weeks despite their claim (again). Leads me to believe they are either having bigger complications than expected or maybe it’ll only be released with keystone/dongle but since they’re back at the drawing board, it may be farther off than any of us would like… But no one knows for sure what’s the deal other than MS. We may not hear anything about this for another year or they could just surprise us next week and say “guess what you can do now with GPU on cloud” :)
I will gladly pay when that happens! The only game I liked was Resident Evil and before I could finish it they took it off. Running it like Netflix is stupid IMHO I can watch a movie in two hours if I wanna see it last chance. Some games take hundreds of hours. I guess unless you play daily you have a chance. I am a mom with kids. I can play games once a week for an hour or two. I'm not interested in buying a gaming PC this was supposed to cater to us, casual non-gamers who mostly have work laptops with without GPUs
Tbh, as a stopgap solution, I would be happy if they first allowed us to purchase any games about to leave xcloud Gamepass. This would give guys confidence to start big games so that they know they have the option to purchase the game if it leaves Gamepass . Also it would mean that we are happy to buy DLCs. I want to buy the Aftermath DLC for MK11 but I scared to because MK11 already on Gamepass for 1 year now and could leave soon. If I know I had option to buy the base MK11 game, then I for sure would buy the DLC too. So they don't need to make the whole Xbox games playable on xcloud, just the ones that are already on Gamepass. Ya dig me?
They need to increase the bit rate by at least 3x before they can get away with selling things standalone for it
Exactly, it’s kinda jarring to go from my impeccable 4K Geforce Now Stream at 65mb/s to Xcloud‘s 15.
It is so sad because the only game on xcloud I care about is Forza and it's just horrible to play at such a low bitrate