AbsolutSurgen

SotTR available for 25% off  at GMG (Master Race Only) -- Today Only

Nintendo went after a low pricepoint on Wii, and arguably on their handhelds. That is not the case with Switch or Wii-U. Microsoft's strategy, IMHO, in the next generation will be to transition gamers into subscription revenue to a higher degree. And the objective of this rumoured box is to create a low price of entry, to drive subscriptions. I am not aware of Nintendo prioritizing subscription revenue in anything they've done.

I didn't get to race Hot Wheels Cars though...

FH3 is the best Forza

EXCLUSIVE: NVIDIA’s Next Generation Graphics Cards Specifications, Pricing And Nomenclature Details " These are the expected MSRPs that AIB and vendors have been informed of by NVIDIA: The 120W NVIDIA next-gen Turing GPU will be priced around $499 MSRP. The 150W NVIDIA next-gen Turing GPU will be priced around $599 MSRP. The 180W NVIDIA next-gen Turing GPU will be priced around $699-749 MSRP. ........... Add in board partners and vendors of NVIDIA are expecting to have the SKUs stocked by the following dates, which is around the same time we should see them released: The NVIDIA next-gen 120W GPU will be arriving at the end of September. The NVIDIA next-gen 150W GPU will be arriving by the second week of September. The NVIDIA next-gen 180W GPU will be arriving in the first week of September." More rumours.

Forza Horizon 2 is a 4 year old game. I haven't played For Honor, my reaction was based on the reviews I read at launch...

That brings back so many fond memories....

It's a different strategy, with the same objective. The strategy is VERY different to what Nintendo is doing.

Another bad month....

Absolutely. It's what they have always wanted with Xbox. They thought they could do it with Kinect. Then they thought they could do it with making Xbox one into a "media box". Now they believe they can do it with Game Pass / streaming.

Correct. A 6-year old $100 video card is not good for running much of anything.

Not for running No Man's Sky.

I'm assuming the OP doesn't have a Pentium 3 and a Voodoo2 if he is asking the question.

PC is always the answer.

Of course. But, in a streaming world, the hardware is almost irrelevant. You don't need to be tied to a MS console. You can create an app that will run on an Amazon Fire, smart TV, or even create your own $20 streaming box. That said, I still think that streaming of games is further away than a lot of people think.

Yes. There are differences between PS4 Pro and XB1X games -- the biggest typically being resolution. Whether you consider them "significant" is something different.

Yes. But they won't want to do that through Microsoft. The publishers will want to own the streaming platform. Why give 30% to MS if you can own it all?

Agreed. I think it is most likely that you will need to buy individual games that you can use with your streaming package, rather than publisher specific "all you can eat" packages.

Yes. I think that is what this what this would essentially be -- except it would have options for access to all/most new releases.

I preordered this months ago on GMG.

There is likely to be a mandatory subscription, that will include a number of games, similar to gamepass. I would be surprised if they would even stream "purchased games" without a subscription. But, I suspect you are correct in that you will need to "buy games" as well -- I would be surprised if EA/Activision/Ubi/etc. would be willing to include their new releases as part of a MS subscription.

Wow -- in my gaming life those games were a lifetime apart. I still remember seeing Karate Champ for the first time at Chuck E Cheese's arcade -- and not being able to quite figure it out.

Microsoft’s streaming Xbox will split up games to keep latency low "Last month, we learned that Microsoft is developing a pair of new Xboxes for release in 2020 under the codename Scarlett. One system will be a full console; the other will be a cloud-connected system for streaming games. Today, Brad Sams at Thurrott.com has more to say about that streaming box. We know Microsoft has been interested in developing a streaming service for many years. At this year's E3, the company reaffirmed that it's working on a streaming service that will allow games to be run in the Azure cloud and streamed to a relatively simple set-top box. This makes the end-user hardware much cheaper, but it has a consistent problem: latency. Every button press on the controller has to travel over the Internet to the server before it can be processed, and every frame of video similarly has to make the reverse trip before it can be seen. For games that don't rely on twitch reactions (RPGs or turn-based games, say) this is no big deal. But for games like first-person shooters, it's a huge problem. According to Sams, Microsoft's solution is that the Scarlett Cloud box (as one person called it) will have some amount of processing power of its own. Not enough to run full games, but enough to do collision detection, input handling, and some amount of graphical processing locally without having to wait for the remote server. To do this, games are split into two parts (referred to as "slices" or "splices")—one part runs in the cloud; the other runs on the console. The result is that Scarlett Cloud is apparently suitable for a wide range of games, even those that would normally be considered too latency-sensitive to be streamable. In fact, Sams reports that every Scarlett game will run on every Scarlett device, so streaming gamers won't be left out. The downside to this approach is that it makes the hardware more expensive than if it was purely a dumb streaming device, but it's still markedly less expensive than a full console would need to be. Streaming games will of course require some kind of a subscription to play. This recurring revenue is a big part of why the company is interested in streamed games in the first place." I still believe that the internet is not read for the streaming of games: 1) Too many people don't have the bandwidth to stream high quality games 2) Data caps are still too low for hard core gamers 3) Not sure if internet connections are stable enough to reliably stream games. I seem to get too many "hiccups" that are annoying on video, but would be disastrous for gaming. However, all signs are pointing to the next generation starting no later than 2020.

My Dad brought home an Atari 2600 pretty early on -- and it all started with playing Combat.

Will watch this tonight.