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打印
Bussiness
來源于《商業》版塊
Computer games
電腦游戲
Unconsoled
無法安慰
Cloud computing is coming to the video-gaming business
云計算正在進入電子游戲行業
More than 70,000 gamers, developers and publishers descended on Los Angeles to goggle at each other’s wares and show off their own at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (e3), which began on June 11th. This year big publishers like Ubisoft and Square Enix used the annual videogame jamboree to show off previews of new games. Keanu Reeves, an actor, hyped up “Cyberpunk 2077”, a hotly anticipated title in which he plays a big role.
6月11日，超過7萬名游戲玩家、開發商和出版商齊聚洛杉磯，在電子娛樂博覽會上互相觀并展示自己的產品。今年，育碧游戲官方網站和史克威爾·艾尼克斯軟件公司等大型發行商利用一年一度的電子游戲盛會來展示新游戲。演員基努•里維斯大肆宣傳了《賽博朋克2077》，這是一個備受期待的名字，他在其中扮演了一個重要角色。
One of the most significant announcements at the show was also one of the briefest. Towards the end of a two-hour presentation, Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s gaming division, offered a few more details about Project xCloud, Microsoft’s foray into cloud gaming. The service will be available in October, he said, before letting gamers loose to try a demo version in the conference centre.
展會上最重要的公告之一也是最簡短的公告之一。在兩個小時的演示接近尾聲時，微軟游戲部門主管菲爾•斯賓塞就微軟進軍云游戲領域的xCloud項目透漏了更多細節。他表示這項服務將于10月份推出，然后讓玩家在會議中心試用一個演示版本。
Cloud gaming aims to do for video games what companies like Spotify and Netflix have done for music and films— make them available on any device with an internet connection. For the $140bn gaming industry, that would be a revolution. The consoles and beefy pcs required to run modern games cost several hundred dollars. Cloud gaming aims to shift the computational heavy lifting into data-centres and to pipe the results to users over the internet. That would allow gamers to play cutting-edge titles on nearly any screen with an internet connection, no matter how feeble the underlying hardware.
云游戲的目標是像Spotify和Netflix等公司為音樂和電影所做的那樣，為視頻游戲提供服務——讓它們可以在任何有互聯網連接的設備上使用。對于規模1400億美元的游戲行業而言，這將是一場革命。運行現代游戲所需的游戲機和結實的個人電腦售價數百美元。云游戲的目標是將計算重擔轉移到數據中心，并將結果通過互聯網傳輸給用戶。這將允許玩家在幾乎任何有互聯網連接的屏幕上玩尖端游戲，不管底層硬件有多弱。
Microsoft is well-placed to make cloud gaming work, says Piers Harding-Rolls of IHS Markit, a research firm. It has a 20-year pedigree through its xbox series of consoles, and its Azure cloud platform is the world’s second-biggest, after Amazon Web Services. But it is not the only tech giant interested in the idea. A few days before e3, Google, which also runs a big cloud business, gave more details about Stadia, its own cloud-gaming product, which is due to launch in November. Industry rumours suggest that Amazon is mulling a similar business. The threat from the cloud giants helped to persuade Sony, which makes the PlayStation series of consoles, to jump into bed with its arch-rival. It already runs a cloud-gaming service called PlayStation but in May Sony signed a deal to employ Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform in its future endeavours.
研究公司IHS Markit的皮爾斯•哈丁-羅爾斯表示，微軟在讓云游戲發揮作用方面處于有利地位。它的xbox系列游戲機已有20年的歷史，其Azure云平臺是僅次于亞馬遜網絡服務的全球第二大云平臺。在e3開幕的前幾天，谷歌也在運營著一家大型云業務，谷歌透漏了更多關于Stadia的細節，這是谷歌自己的云游戲產品，將于11月推出。業內傳言稱，亞馬遜也在考慮類似的業務。來自云計算巨頭的威脅幫助說服了PlayStation系列游戲機的制造商索尼與其主要競爭對手一起合作。它已經運行了一個名為PlayStation的云游戲服務，但在5月份，索尼簽署了一項協議，將在未來盡量使用微軟的Azure云平臺。
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