Mary Jo Foley mentioned on TWiT Windows Weekly that Dave Cutler, the Microsoft man who helped create Windows NT and Windows Azure, had moved to Xbox along with a senior hypervisor architect. Why would Microsoft want that to happen? My mind went racing and one of the live listeners thought the exact same thing as me.
There’s not been much innovation in the life of the gaming console in it’s long history. We went from twisting paddles, to joysticks, to controllers. Not something big. We went from cartridges to DVD. Not a huge leap either. Wii and Kinect really were big changes but I feel we’re only at the start of that evolution.
An interesting thing happened sometime in the last couple of years (don’t ask me when precisely). A service called OnLive kicked off. It was a cloud based game streaming service. The game executes in a remote data centre and the gamer connects to it via their local machine. The restrictions are based on latency, meaning that the gamer must be relatively close to the data centre, e.g. not playing in London with a data centre in Sydney.
What I instantly thought when I heard the above was that maybe Xbox Live was thinking of doing something similar, but by taking advantage of the Microsoft Global Foundation Services data centres that are located globally and host services such as Windows Azure, Office 365, and so forth. Imagine it, games running in optimized virtual machines on specifically designed gaming virtualisation hosts. If you could design the hardware and write the hypervisor from scratch, and take advantage of a network of globally dispersed data centres with huge bandwidth capabilities, well you could do something cool. Then combine that with technology similar to Windows 8 RemoteFX (design for the WAN) and the availability of Xbox Live on Windows Phone, Xbox, and Windows 8 … hmm … and throw into the mix the reported incredibly high numbers of people who subscribe to Xbox Live Gold. This could be really interesting.
Imagine the possibilities. You finish up work. On the bus or train you take out your Windows Phone, you start up a game that is streamed from a “local” data centre. You arrive at your stop and pause the game. In the sitting room you power up your Xbox, connect and un-pause the game. You want to go upstairs so you wake up your Windows 8 tablet and transfer the game connection to there. Seamless.
At this point, the gaming device becomes less important. It’s all about the service and the subscription. Actually, that’s kind of true right now. Xbox is sold at a loss or cost price so you can get the machine, subscribe to Live Gold, and buy the games. It’s the “attach” that Microsoft makes money from. If Microsoft could take the Xbox out of the mix and focus entirely on the service then they can remove device churn from the equation and eliminate consumer hardware as a limiting factor to gaming/entertainment innovation.
That’s my mad theory on it anyway. It could be really cool if something like this happened.