Microsoft's planning and marketing director Albert Penello has told Gamespot that streaming games from servers to your screen is perfectly possible, but that Microsoft needs to work out the cost and decide upon implementation first. "Yeah, absolutely," he said, when the site asked whether Microsoft might follow in the footsteps of Sony, which will allow players to stream PS3 games to their PS4s (assuming various launch day niggles are sorted out, anyway). "That's one of the things that makes [the cloud] at the same time both totally interesting and hard to describe to people. "Because what the cloud can do is sort of hard to pin," he admitted. "When you say to the customer, we want the box to be connected, we want developers to know that the cloud is there. We're really not trying to make up some phony thing. There's been cynicism about Xbox One's cloud support, which Microsoft has described as "limitless" - detractors have taken issue with claims that it effectively represents additional RAM for the machine, pointing out that broadband latency renders this "extra memory" useless for tasks such as graphics rendering. Microsoft has acknowledged this, but insists that developers can run AI, physics calculations and other, less time-critical tasks on servers, freeing up box-side resources for other jobs. Here's Respawn Entertainment with more on that. "There are so many things that the servers can do," Penello went on. "Using our Azure cloud servers, sometimes it's things like voice processing. It could be more complicated things like rendering full games like a Gaikai and delivering it to the box. We just have to figure out how, over time, how much does that cost to deliver, how good is the experience."
There's also the worry that games that rely on Xbox One cloud support will become unplayable as and when Microsoft winds down support for the Xbox One (its predecessor is projected to have an 11-year lifespan). Penello feels that's a question the industry at large must answer, however, observing that games on all platforms are experimenting with the always-online model. "I think that's a great question for the industry," he said. "Because I could point to the fact that there are still plenty of games on Xbox One and Xbox 360 that are total offline mode. You could ask the same question for World of Warcraft. Like someday, what happens if Blizzard turns off the switch? Where's all my money, where's everything? That's a great question the industry is going to face. And it's going to be game-dependent."
