Microsoft's Xbox Streaming Console 'Keystone' Was Pushed Back Because of Its Price (theverge.com) 28
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has revealed why the company delayed its plans to introduce an Xbox streaming console, speaking to Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on The Verge's Decoder podcast this week. The Verge reports: "It was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out with the hardware that we had inside," said Spencer, discussing the Keystone prototype device that recently appeared on his office shelves. "We decided to focus that team's effort on delivering the smart TV streaming app." Microsoft delivered an Xbox TV app in partnership with Samsung instead, but it doesn't mean the idea for a streaming-only Xbox console is fully over. "With Keystone, we're still focused on it and watching when we can get the right cost," reveals Spencer.
Microsoft wanted to aim for around $129 or $99 for this Xbox streaming device, says Spencer, and hints that bundling a controller with the streaming console, as well as Microsoft's silicon component choices, had pushed the price up closer to the $299 Xbox Series S. The choice to bundle a controller matches what Microsoft traditionally does with its Xbox consoles and was also Google's original approach to putting its discontinued Stadia cloud gaming service on TVs. But a cloud gaming TV stick or puck could support any controller you have if the hardware supports Bluetooth, so it's interesting Microsoft specifically wanted to bundle an Xbox controller, likely to make the user experience feel more seamless.
Microsoft wanted to aim for around $129 or $99 for this Xbox streaming device, says Spencer, and hints that bundling a controller with the streaming console, as well as Microsoft's silicon component choices, had pushed the price up closer to the $299 Xbox Series S. The choice to bundle a controller matches what Microsoft traditionally does with its Xbox consoles and was also Google's original approach to putting its discontinued Stadia cloud gaming service on TVs. But a cloud gaming TV stick or puck could support any controller you have if the hardware supports Bluetooth, so it's interesting Microsoft specifically wanted to bundle an Xbox controller, likely to make the user experience feel more seamless.
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I wouldn't expect to actually make money on
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The official controllers retail for that much, but the manufacturing cost is much lower. For streaming the hardware needed is very low end and low cost these days. Just an entry level ARM SoC with hardware decoding for H.265 or AV1.
I imagine the main issue was that they wanted certain features, like 4k or 120Hz support, that meant using a higher end SoC. Even then, on sale the fairly old Nvidia shield comes in at their target price. On top of that the machine would be useless without a subscription service,
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The official controllers retail for that much, but the manufacturing cost is much lower. [...] I imagine the main issue was that they wanted certain features
No, the issue is that they don't want to lose a lot of money selling these consoles until they've proven that the product is viable. Microsoft still takes a substantial loss on new console sales.
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Manufacturing costs $5; Microsoft profit $95 (Score:2)
You can't sell a subscription on a controller so you need to grab all profit in advance.
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The Xbox controllers seem poorly made too.
I've used maybe half a dozen.
2 had the same button not always register a click from new.
2 had bad alignment of the top and bottom halves. So it often jabs my palm.
And 1 developed stick drift after a month.
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I suspect OP bought third party controllers, which are notorious for being crap - versus the official Microsoft controllers which are generally decent quality and last.
Third party controllers genuinely suck and have poor construction, and it's no real surprise - given an official contro
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All were new first party MS controllers.
I didn't care much since most were bought by work for the office.
Then I got a personal xbox from Amazon, and the X key will only register when pressed from certain angles. The same fault as the one at work.
Maybe the work ones were mistreated by other employees... but my private controller was lightly used a couple times before I noticed the issue.
Maybe just unlucky with the controller lottery.
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I can backup the parent, Over the years I've have to buy many 360 pads because they wear out, particularly the dpads which become near unusable in short order but they were solidly built at least and felt like a decent device with some design flaws. However when I bought a genuine first party series X pad from a reputable high street chain I actually did a double take at how poor the quality was. I was convinced I had been sold a fake. The flimsy "eco" packaging belied a similarly shoddy product on the insi
Streaming games is a suck prospect (Score:1)
Gaming has at its core an aspect of immediacy due to being a form of entertainment. There is the expectation of immediate outcomes, immediate availability, immediate satisfaction. None of these are satisfied by any offering available. Local copies are the current way to deliver this. We are nowhere near streaming satisfaction or availability levels. This is not unlike other forms of entertainment, such as gambling, but the microtransactionists have obviously gamed this out very well and found it's a hard se
This is the conundrum of 'streaming' gaming (Score:2)
The hardware capable of streaming is very likely to come with a viable GPU for actually rendering at decent quality. The niche of 'good enough to decode 4k streams' but short of 'actually having a GPU that can client-side render the content' is pretty narrow, and is only going to get more unlikely over time.
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Not really, not even close. You just need a hardware AV1 (or whatever) decoder. It could be an entry-level ARM chip otherwise.
Actually rendering complex games at 1080p let alone 4k takes waaay more horsepower. Check out the Chromecast for example, it can kind-of play some basic native Android games but would choke if you tried Call of Duty. Streaming on the other hand is fine: https://youtu.be/7sb9-NOxZlg?t... [youtu.be]
That thing costs less than $50. So MS must've been trying to do something silly here.
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Of course, the Chromecast is using a 2018 GPU and the refresh of that GPU is significantly more potent, despite the cost of SoCs implementing that targeting the same general ballpark in price.
Sure, you aren't going to be competing with 4090, but in my experience with a Stadia trial, while the graphics may have been ostensibly higher quality, it suffered from latency and transcoding artifacts, and I'd rather have slightly more simplistic graphics rendered locally than endure the streaming experience for gami
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I haven't tried either but from what I've heard is that GeForce Now was supposedly better than Stadia in terms of latency.
You can of course run games on a midrange SoC but Microsoft doesn't want the "we have Call of Duty at home" experience. In fact they already has a console that plays games poorly locally, so what exactly would be the point of an even shittier version? Beyond providing an inconsistent experience, it would require porting every game to an ARM system and remastering assets as well.
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There is some serious magic voodoo going on with game streaming. I don't know how they do it, but even on not-great connections it seems to work.
People are able to do game streaming while flying using inflight wifi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The hardware capable of streaming is very likely to come with a viable GPU for actually rendering at decent quality.
When I was in the xbox xcloud beta, they initially only released an Android client, which I ran on a samsung galaxy s20.
It used a snapdragon cpu, and a family-matching gpu (Sorry, I never really memorized the chip names in the mobile arm world)
The big deal with xcloud was that all the heavy 3d rendering was done server-side, and only the final video frames were streamed to the device.
Basically if your device can watch youtube, it has enough power to play xcloud.
MS stated after the beta they would also relea
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My point is in the same ballpark as the BOM for a ChromeCast, you can have actually locally rendered content of decent quality.
For example, the Nintendo switch released nearly 6 years ago at under $300 including a touch display and controllers. "Tablet class" hardware in 2017 was able to deliver pretty decent graphics, and a 'stick' without the extras based on the same hardware would have been well under $200.
Now we are several generations of product past that. The notion of a chip being cheap by omitting
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My point is in the same ballpark as the BOM for a ChromeCast, you can have actually locally rendered content of decent quality.
But that's not in fact at all true. You do not need a full GPU for video decode, and even if you have one, you won't need as many cores as you would for 3d gaming.
the Nintendo switch released nearly 6 years ago at under $300 including a touch display and controllers.
The nintendo switch has garbage GPU performance compared to every other system today. It has like 1/4 the GPU power of an Xbone.
The notion of a chip being cheap by omitting competent GPU is rapidly evaporating.
That's complete nonsense, or else every Smart TV would include enough GPU for gaming. And I've benchmarked my shitty HiSense TV, and it has plenty of CPU, but the GPU is garbage. The benchmark renderings are a series of p
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Which is a big chunk of why I feel compelled to complain.
Of course, the DRM is already infested the industry to the point that if I lose internet connection, my 'purchased' library is likely to be unplayable after a short while.
It worked for Google...right? (Score:2)
Microsoft wants to build Stadia, but with a proper game library.
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The only "proper" game library is all my Windows and Xbox titles*. Anything else is only useful to me if I'm traveling.
* Sold all my consoles a while back, no regerts