covering the week's top textbooks like Linux bias Microsoft no longer sees PlayStation Maker Sony and Nintendo as the biggest competition for its Xbox platform Phil Spencer Microsoft's head of gaming said he now considered Amazon and Google as his top rivals because of their cloud computing infrastructure he believes their transitional rivals Nintendo and traditional rivals Nintendo and Sony are out of step with the future of gaming he said quote when you talk about Nintendo and Sony we have a ton of respect for them but we see Amazon and Google as the main competitors going forward that's not to disrespect Nintendo and Sony but the traditional gaming companies are somewhat out of position end quote what cloud gaming players don't need to buy a games console instead the games are run on servers and huge data centers with the footage streamed over the Internet to a TV computer smartphone or a tablet it means players don't need to buy discs or download games and software updates which can take a long time Google entered the home gaming market in 2019 with its stadia streaming service the company's vast cloud computing business means that it has the necessary infrastructure in place but critics say the lineup of games on stadia stadia is currently sparse while Amazon and Apple offer games on their app stores and Apple offers a monthly subscription they don't currently offer a cloud gaming service however Amazon also operates an enormous cloud computing business and is rumored to be developing a game service Sony has offered its PlayStation now cloud gaming service since 2014 letting gamers stream more than 700 titles to a ps4 console or PC however it currently streams games in 720p resolution by contrast Google stadia can stream its games at up to 4k resolution NVIDIA has officially launched its GeForce now streaming service after months of testing and both Sony and Microsoft have already announced that they are still working on new games consoles for home totally demonstrates the shift yeah and how things are being how technology is being provisioned I feel old I guess in the fact that my brain doesn't get it like I don't understa Lille Achtung - Kong a little mind-bending yeah well we've been sold for so many years that the biggest most powerful console is gonna give you the best gaming experience now we're being told oh well you can do it on your phone you can do it on this little $100 device you can do it on anything oh and then you can transition over to your computer which doesn't even have to be a good computer it can be a Chromebook yeah what I think the difference though and I mean admittedly I have not explored Google and Amazon gaming services so I can't speak from first-hand knowledge but the ability to go offline is what separates the two oh yeah yeah but but maybe that's the ideas that were never offline anymore well and sure we are but do we really but when we're at that point aren't it's just we're always connected Jeff but that always connected business you're right we are always connected but dive 860 that's an assumption of necessary connectivity I like we see this with our kids all the time they play games that are not online it's downloaded and that's it like sure minecraft is a great one for kids that are younger where they're playing minecraft it's not going online I mean you could go to realms and stuff but the difference here is yeah if you're gonna go with the cloud-based computer gaming services you're stuck to a couple of things you're stuck to what they offer from the choices and the graphics and all that kind of stuff which I think again I don't know from firsthand would be subpar compared to what you can pull out of say you know an Xbox one ass or you know PlayStation 5 with with their graphics I mean I can't see playing like Red Dead Redemption on my phone you can't you haven't seen it yet still it's from the technological perspective everything's going club yes but the the quality so you're saying will it look as good so the quality is not the video the video is your my TV is 1080p so it's 1920 by 1080p regardless of how powerful my system is or not so yet for some reason if I use a first gen we versus a Playstation 4 I'm going to notice a quality difference in the pricing and ensure it's a different system in it so it is apples to oranges but what I mean is the power of that more powerful system even though my TV never changed resolution it's still the same resolution the video quality is still the same right ok but it looks so much better because that one is so much more powerful so now take that and put it into a cloud server where this cloud server is still streaming 1920 by 1080 P 2 to my 1080p TV mm-hmm and yet it has so much power yes it's a multibillion-dollar system versus my little $400 right console right so so the the the resolution is not the bottleneck now our our internet is capable of streaming 4k video in real time with no latency right that's incredible mm-hmm so now put it back and in there that is so powerful that I can do that on my cheap device yeah and on any device and I can transition from device to device I don't have to buy anything in particular to be able to use my games and the transition is happening but the transitions gonna be difficult for people like me who still like to go to the store and buy a game and you and I actually kind of and if they business you take it with you and put it on I hesitate even buying digital copies of games but I like to have the action game but I understand that the future is is coming up quick and I'm still gonna buy a ps5 but I'm gonna also likely play games on stadia right yeah and that's that's an interesting point I want to just reiterate what you just said which is I'm going to also play video games on stadia stadia so I don't think that we're replacing that offline phone device I think we're supplementing it and say it has hey now okay you can you can also when you're connected to the Internet play games that you can't play when you're offline that are like high-end yeah and that's where okay maybe this is just another con another platform we all have multiple plans I wonder if they'll have a bit like now here's the latency is too high for VR here cuz should I have got to be able it's gotta be able to track you with this right now so I mean like you've brought up VR which you know totally make sense our future yes what about things like framerate because you said 64k that's pretty good to me no but no III hear you but you're talking about the screen resolution I mean if your internet can't keep up it's gonna impact your gameplay do you remember when we used to be like oh I'm like I'm so bad yeah like oh yeah is this open or to go back to lagging or my car my kids gonna go well yes however consider this as and I know we do need to move on to the next story but consider that the very companies that are pushing the technology shift are the same companies who are controlling the introduction of like Google's gigabit fiber to the home right right so yeah if that's the case oh you know it's gonna perform well it's like you you just know that that's what they're driving toward and and they're not gonna build a service that's gonna fail based on that this latency is a big thing sure sure and because this is internet-based it's going to be it's going to resolve the cross-platform compatibility issues it's an interesting thing though because you have to remember that this is not game streaming this is video streaming we've already proven through YouTube and through everything else that video streaming is great these days yep there's no latency on videos like like really in real time if it was real time so they've created real time video streaming service that has the interactivity of controls and control doesn't take a lot of bandwidth no so it's like it's instant as long as you don't have high pings right as long as you don't have latency on your internet connection and that's the key thing and so they'll be driving ISPs to support their codecs and yeah we'll see an evolution in that kind of thing very cool if you've tried stadia or any other cloud-based service comment below let us know if you've been contemplating it maybe post why you haven't tried it told me out