My Vita can do this for “a variety of applications.” And that’s the problem Forge. It only works for SOME applications.
I’m interested in learning which applications it doesn’t work with. If I can’t load up another game and alt-tab between them, I’m totally fine with that. But there’s no instant switching between gaming and Netflix or music or videos, then yes, of course that will suck.
Also, Teiman, your numbers are way off. That $19m figure was the Xbox division’s quarterly profit, not the cost of running the servers, or even the overall cost of revenue. In FY 12, the division (technically entertainment and devices) had revenue of $9.6bn, which I assume is your $9000m figure, and operating income of $370m. In other words its costs were $9.2bn.
Also, there’s simply no way of telling how much the servers cost from the information MS is providing in its accounts. Pretty much the best you can do is say it’s not more than roughly $1.65bn, as they’ve explicitly attributed $290m (more or less) of costs to other things.
This was posted yesterday. And yes, this answers SOME questions about the Xbox One user interface but not all. If you just use your console for gaming and that’s about it, I completely understand why you wouldn’t care at all about something like this. But for me, consoles last gen evolved into smartphone status - you might use it for one thing primarily (gaming) but you fully expect it to do other things as well. And like a smartphone, it matters how quickly and easily you can do those other things.
So basically it’s the metro UI from Windows 8.
Certainly sounds like it. And that’s my worry. On some PCs that OS is smooth. On others, it is not.
Teiman
3915
Sorry. You are probably right. I should get better at internet detective. :P
Me = Fail.
Have you tried to swap between two big iPad games? try LEGO Harry Potter and Gratuitous Space Battles.
User perception can be somewhat off here.
Excellent point Teiman. But I am willing to accept that game to game switching isn’t going to happen. I’m more interested in what will work and more importantly (beyond game to game switching) what won’t work
I thought we’d hear a release date at GamesCon today. Guess not.
JeffL
3918
Jake, I’m just not following you. Right now, if I’m playing Fallout:New Vegas, and my wife comes in and we decide to watch, say, The Wire on HBOGo or a show on Netflix, I push a button to go to the XBox home, then click on the Netflix or HBOGo app I have pinned to that home screen. What is it that you are finding so onerous about that? Same for switching to a TV show on Dish - I make sure my game is saved, then push a button on my AVR remote to switch to Dish and I’m there.
It just takes too long. I’m with Jake on this one. It takes way too long. I get about 1-3 hours of leisure time in any particular evening. If I’m using 3-4 minutes each time switching to a different app, it just feels like a big fat waste of time. Plus I don’t have cable or dish anymore, so I have to wait to even switch between Hulu Plus and Netflix to watch shows on the 360. It’s a pretty long wait.
What Rock8man said. If it’s next gen, I want to instantly switch between the things I want to do on my console as easily as I can on a PC
Plus you’d have to save your game or lose progress right now, but with the PS4 and Xbox One your game will stay suspended exactly where you were even while you are streaming video.
Look at the PS4 UI demo Sony did. Killzone was suspended in the background even while the system was sleeping. He was able to wake it up, log in, spectate some streams, but when he wanted to jump into a multiplayer match it only took like 7 seconds to connect to the server and spawn into the match. Right now if you got an invite you’d spend several minutes while the game loaded, the server negotiation happened and the level loaded. That kind of near instantaneous switching will be the kind of next gen feature in a year or two people won’t believe they lived without.
Exactly. That video definitely showed some features that I want as standard in next gen.
Teiman
3923
Task switching game to apps may be smooth, since they are reserving the memory. Nothing to load, just change context and elevate/change cpu mode. Completelly different to multiple games loaded in memory, that is the hard thing, I think.
Teiman
3925
Microsoft is now like that comedy about a dead body two idiots drag around pretending to be alive.
not a spoiler
In like… nothing. But is friday and had this weird connection. I am bad at analogies.
Fair enough, I can see the reason for that. Bring on a new CEO with a more devices centric background to aid the transition. So, who’s it going to be? Senior leader from Nokia? One of the ousted leaders from…gasp…RIM?!
Should be interesting times for MS.
stusser
3928
Ballmer is a known name, but he presided over MS as it failed to adapt to the changing marketplace. Microsoft had a dominant position 10 years ago and now they’re approaching an afterthought.
