Speaking with GameRant in a recent interview, James Gwertzman, Head of Cloud Gaming at Microsoft affirmed that cloud gaming technologies can help big AAA-sandbox games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption by creating a perfect living and breathing world within days.
Gwertzman affirms that it “almost feels like a waste” on part of Rockstar Games to invest so much effort and resources in a world that will only be used once. The executive takes Cyberpunk 2077 as an example as well by stating that creating the massive and ambitious Night City was not cheap.
Cloud gaming technologies can allow a development team to build just one complex world that can be exported to a different game. The development team can update and make some changes to the world, making it quick and cheap while also making room for further edits without having to keep an eye on the development budget.
“What if someone else built the world, and you just borrowed it like a backlot at a movie studio and had a live updated version for your game?” said Gwertzman. “We’re already seeing things like that with Roblox, with mods, with Minecraft. On one level these are games but they’re also platforms for building other games.”
The executive claims that cloud gaming will change how the industry sees video game development. Basically, one company can build, lease, or rent their creations to developers for their games. The best example of the idea is Asobo’s Microsoft Flight Simulator, the game renders the entire planet through satellite data, the development team allegedly took three days to compile and adjust the data that we now see in the simulator.
“It would’ve been tens of thousands of artists building the earth in 3D, but the computer can do it,” explained Gwertzman. “Once you’ve built the model once and it works, once you’ve trained it, you can run the model on the entire earth. And, it only took 72 hours.
It took a massive amount of compute power, but that’s the advantage of the cloud. You can grab thousands of servers for 72 hours and then release them when you’re done. That’s expensive, but you don’t have to be a big company to do that. You can lease the data from somewhere and rent the server space.”
Source: GameRant
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Includes several titles.
Which was showcased at E3 2003.