Happy New Year everybody! I hope your 2014 is as great as my 2013 was. I apologize again for neglecting my blog, I have been highly engaged in a very exciting project that I haven’t been able to tear myself away from for a while. That said, there have been many interesting news items recently that I just can’t let pass without comment. Here’s my current favorite, Microsoft rationalizing the “need” for a Blu-ray drive on the XBOX ONE.
http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/02/microsoft-seriously-considered-releasing-xbox-one-without-a-disc-drive-following-e3-2013/
Yeah… no you guys made a really bad decision on this one, I suspect the real problem with making the smart choices here was that it was already too late for Microsoft to change course. Several months ago, before the XBOX ONE was announced, I advocated that if Microsoft were smart it would be a diskless device with a pure online service and that they should bury the media features and make Kinect optional. The result would be a device that they might have been able to price around $299, would have no moving parts and thus be MUCH less subject to hardware failure and would allow them to focus on a purely online content model that everyone would understand because they’re already used to buying games online, instead of making the frankenconsole that is the XBOX ONE. In this article Microsoft seems to acknowledge that this was a direction they WANTED to pursue but concluded it was impossible or impractical. I just wanted to point out that based on Phil Spenser’s own facts stated here it was OBVIOUSLY possible and highly practical.
Speaking as somebody with almost 23 patents in streaming media and 3D related technologies and as founder of one of the Internet’s largest downloadable game services which I founded in an era when people used to say the same thing about delivering quality games over a modem, the problem is actually quite simple to solve today.
Let’s examine Phil’s worst case scenario that ALL XBOX ONE games are 50GB and that everyone’s internet connection is an abysmal 7.4 megabits per second. At that speed a game would indeed need almost 15 hours to download! The Blu-ray drive that comes with XBOX ONE is said to be a 6X drive, which specs out to 216 megabits per second or 29X faster than a crappy broadband connection in theory. Here’s an interesting article on the Blu-ray install time for PS4 vs XBOX ONE games:
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/11/28/game-install-times-on-xbox-one-ps4-compared/
Note that according to the article XBOX ONE games need to “fully install” to the hard drive before they will run. Why? Optical media is really only achieves its peak speed when data is read from it continuously. Random reading of optical media will cause its performance to plummet catastrophically, thus trying to run a game that is frequently loading data from random locations in a file system will perform terribly. To compensate for this Microsoft copies the media to the hard drive which generally performs much better at random data accesses. The XBOX ONE hard drive probably has a data throughput rate of around 80MB/s which means it can fill the XBOX ONE’s 8GB of available RAM in under… 2 minutes. By comparison it would take a 7.4 megabit internet connection over 147 minutes to fill 8GB of RAM.
In this context it really doesn’t matter how LARGE a video game is, it only matters how much available RAM the console has because that limit determines the maximum size that a real-time game experience can have without having to pause to load data. Once a console has to go to disk or the network for a large amount of data it’s going to take a major performance hit or have to stop trying to achieve a real-time experience long enough to complete the data transfer.
So far it would seem apparent that Microsoft had NO OTHER CHOICE but to include a blu-ray disk with the XBOX ONE…. if it were not for one obvious question…. How compressed are XBOX ONE games when they are shipped on Blu-ray media? Anybody? Are they compressed at all? Why is this important? Because, as we have all been reading for months, new generation consoles have inconceivably powerful GPU’s and CPU’s compared to their predecessors. They are capable of computational feats in real-time that stagger the imagination. We appreciate this power in the visual effects we see on screen… but what is this power being used for when a game is being installed? NOTHING!
Years ago when I was founding WildTangent and the internet was predominantly connected via modems I did a series of compression tests on the assets for leading PC games. Using a simple compression tool like PKZIP they often compressed around 3.4x, but as WildTangent and Value later profited from immensely, we found that when we selectively compressed the individual media assets within a game compression ratios of 10X-30X were practical. I had this very same debate with Gabe Newell at the time and invited him over to WildTangent to prove to him that we could deliver a 3.6 megabyte level of Half-Life over a modem by compressing it to 250 kilobytes and streaming it. Furthermore, we found that games were simply NOT designed to stream, they were designed to run on a fast hard drive and made heavy use of random data reads. Most of these games with a tiny amount of work could be re-ordered in memory to load serially thus making them streamable over a network connection. Today most of the world enjoys highly compressed streamed games over the internet from services like WildTangent, Steam, Facebook and many others.
In short the difference between a 7.4 megabit per second internet connection and a 216 megabit per second Blu-ray drive is 29X compression with a next generation game console super computer sitting idle while the data is being copied to the hard drive. The only reason that XBOX ONE games are 50GB is because the Blu-ray drive holds 50GB and costs the same to master whether the developer uses the space or not, so why not fill it with crap? Why bother compressing anything? If the XBOX ONE had no drive, games would magically be smaller and yet somehow contain the same quality content because the developers would invest a little effort into compressing their assets and streaming them. The fact that there is such a huge performance disparity between the PS4’s initial game load time and the XBOX ONE’s also suggests that Sony may have given a little thought to streaming a games initial launch experience to get it going while it finishes copying to the hard drive in the background while the user is playing.
I suppose that suggesting this might sound like CRAZY rocket science if it weren’t already employed ubiquitously across the Internet since 1999 for online game publishing and… do I really have to point out that this is EXACTLY how we deliver streaming video over the internet or directly off a Blu-ray drive without having to COPY a movie to the hard drive? Video data has to be compressed by nearly 100X to be streamable and it is obviously decompressed in real-time while we consume it on the same devices we’re playing our games on. OBVIOUSLY this approach works… furthermore Microsoft OBVIOUSLY knows this, they sit next door to two of the internet’s largest online streaming game publishers founded by ex-Microsoft employees.
Microsoft’s reasons for encumbering the XBOX ONE with an expensive Blu-Ray drive had nothing to do with the practical limitations of delivering games purely online. They wanted to use the XBOX’s popularity as a game console to try to dominate other media consumption in the home so they saddled it with a Blu-ray drive to support their ambition to control video and music delivery to the living room. (Oddly repeating the mistake Sony made with the PS/3 that gave the XBOX 360 the lead in the previous console generation) They also needed to keep the retail channel happy by preserving the retail market for physical games because retailers don’t make their money from console sales. Unlike Apple, which controls its own channel, Microsoft is dependent on retail partners and therefore may feel that they CAN’T dispense with physical media despite the obvious consumer experience benefits and technical practicality of doing so.
I think this is an area where Microsoft made a HUGE mistake because had they embraced a purely digital model for the XBOX ONE (and made Kinect optional) they could have launched XBOX ONE as a $299 device. The resulting price difference between a $300 console and a $600 console would have driven XBOX ONE sales up, they would have sold more games initially, and been able to focus their energy on making their online experience, which is a disaster now, GREAT. They would also have been able to focus more on making a great, simple to use media delivery service like Apple TV. To appease the channel they could let them sell XBOX ONE virtual goods and games at retail. I think that if Microsoft had invested a tiny fraction of the energy they wasted trying to make the XBOX ONE a bloated media center into just making it a great online game publishing service it would have leapt ahead of Sony’s PS4 out of the gate.
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