Microsoft’s Xbox One launches in the US, Canada and some European countries on 22 November, but rumours persist that the Xbox Live cloud servers are not ready for the launch.
Speaking at GDC Next, a summit for game developers interested in using Microsoft’s Xbox Live cloud for off-site compute, Xbox Live lead program manager John Bruno said that the service was only 18 months old as of 5 November 2013, and still had issues with game updates and Xbox One clients.
“Once in a while, rather frequently actually, the host OS will require an update, meaning the physical machine is going to get rebooted whether your code is running or not,” he explained. “That’s a problematic thing for a game, and oftentimes it’s in the middle of a multiplayer session. We’ve worked very hard to overcome that, but that’s not to say it’s going to be a reality in every case.”
That’s quite an odd issue to have not solved with fifteen days left on the launch countdown. When asked how game developers were going to overcome the restart issues, Bruno acknowledged that some studios would be tempted to use their own servers instead while the issue was being worked on.
Titanfall screenshot from the Fracture Battle map
Specifically for Titanfall, an online-only multiplayer extravaganza available for the Xbox One, 360 and PC, Bruno could not comment on how they would solve the issue for what could be Microsoft’s first big system-seller.
“I don’t know what the guys over at Titanfall have built into their game. It’s up to the game developer. If they want to rely more on our XBLC service, we’re happy to support that. We do provide a platform for them to persist data, but that’s up to the developer to utilize that,” he said.
Microsoft has previously advertised that any developer interested in releasing a game for the Xbox One will have free access to their cloud server service for off-site computations as well as online storage, along with free hardware and software support.
But having been in development for 18 months, it’s clear that Microsoft assumed that their online policies which they presented at E3 would be welcomed by the public. Instead, the numerous U-turns they’ve had to make regarding their online services in the past few months has lead to a great deal of confusion, feature pulls and a lot of backtracking in promises.
Thus far, Microsoft has not allowed journalists and game reviewers to play a multi-player title on the One and they’ve had to pull back on their launch countries significantly for the release of the One. Time will tell if the Live servers will be ready and working on launch day.
Source: I Game Responsibly
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During development, servers are restarted often to fine tune performance and fix bugs, after go-live these restarts are scheduled, very much like WOW servers.
We’ll only know on release day if MS play pays off, because PS4 games wont be playable due to server load issues (like most game launches) or XBOne Cloud computing is just not consumer ready.