After Crackdown 3‘s impressive Gamesom demonstration last week, the topic on everyone’s tongue has been the possibilities of Microsoft’s cloud computing in future games – will they use it for Gears of War? For Halo? For Forza? If Xbox boss Phil Spencer had his way, it wouldn’t just be exclusives using it.
When questioned on Twitter about what kind of games we’re likely to see, Spencer replied with optimism:
@Dipslon I hope so, I'd like to see 3rd parties pick up the tech as well. Innovation moves more quickly as more games push what's possible.
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) August 10, 2015
Seeing as third-party ventures could include titles such as Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, and pretty much any other multiplatform game you care to think of – the possibilities that developers could uncover in any of these three alone are unprecedented. Grand Theft Auto or Battlefield using the same level of destruction as Crackdown 3 would be incredible, but that only scratches the surface.
If the feature never comes to multiplatform games due to an issue of parity, third-party studios could still make exclusive titles that take advantage of the technology, which at this stage seems more likely.
Perhaps showing incentives such as Crackdown 3‘s use of cloud compute would push more games in the future to take advantage of it, but at this point in time one can only hope.