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战斗力 鹅
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注册时间 2018-3-28
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给你分享一段Ben Thompson的分析吧，讲Xbox的，他可能没有泥潭这么懂游戏，但是业界分析还是水平很高的。
Microsoft and the Xbox
I’ve been pretty critical of the Xbox over the years, arguing that it failed at its strategic goal (winning the living room not just for gamers but for everyone) and didn’t make sense for Microsoft in the long run. Microsoft, though, has continued to insist that it was committed to gaming, and it backed that up at the ongoing E3 game conference. From Techcrunch:
Xbox head Phil Spencer announced Sunday that Microsoft has acquired Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Undead Labs and Compulsion Games. The four studios will add to Microsoft’s considerable heft in first-party game development, especially as the company looks to strengthen its game download subscription service Xbox Game Pass.
The Xbox One originally lagged behind the PS4 this generation due to its misguided focus on the living room (including charging $100 more at launch because of the now-discontinued Kinect that was at the center of that effort), but the bigger problem has been a lack of exclusive titles relative to the PS4. One way to counter that is to simply produce them yourself, and these purchases augment Microsoft’s ability to do just that.
What is more important, though, is what these acquisitions say about the future. First, the current generation is winding down, so clearly Microsoft is committed to the next generation. What is more compelling, though, is what comes after that. The CEO of 3rd-party developer Ubisoft told Variety:
I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware…With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home. There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us.
EA previewed something similar for CNet:
EA thinks the technological and economic shifts that changed the music and movie industries are coming to games. Moss says the end result will be the same: You’ll be able to play games on any device at any time as long as it’s connected to the internet. “The combination of streaming and subscriptions is really going to change the way games are consumed,” Moss said. He declined to say how much EA’s service would cost or when it would launch. But it could be in the next couple years.
To that end, while announcing that Microsoft was indeed working on another console, Spencer announced the company was working on its own streaming service, without disclosing dates or pricing. Annoyingly, this sort of vague pre-announcement is pretty common in the gaming industry, but there is no reason to think it isn’t real: Sony already has a streaming service called PlayStation Now. It’s not perfect — there are widespread complaints about lag, dropped connections, missing saves, etc. — but it is at least a peak at a future where a huge library of games is available Netflix style.
Still, PlayStation Now requires a PS4: what EA and Microsoft are talking about is a service that works on any device, from a phone to a smart TV to a PC to a console, because all of the computation is done in the cloud, and that right there is where the Xbox suddenly starts to make a lot more strategic sense: Microsoft has a massive advantage in a future where games are predominantly cloud-based.
First off, in terms of performance, Azure has superior geographic coverage to AWS and Google, much less whatever Sony, EA, or any of its other competitors come up with, which is the most important factor for overcoming lag. Secondly, Microsoft’s financial advantage is even more significant, given that those data centers are being built not for Xbox but for Azure; sure, in the final accounting some amount of those fixed costs would be attributed to Xbox (all the better for Azure’s financials!), but the overall willingness and ability to invest will be much greater for Microsoft relative to its competition.
Indeed, I find this idea so compelling that I must formally withdraw my recommendation that Microsoft get out of gaming; I still believe that the Xbox was a failure in terms of its original goals, but sometimes failure leads to opportunity, and streaming seems to be a significant one, for both Xbox specifically and Azure generally. |
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发表于 2018-6-13 12:24
