Gimmick? Did you SEE what they're doing with The Division using that thing? That's by no means a 'gimmick.' But that's irrelevant. 'Deciding' on a console this early is just not a move a smart person would make. Hang on til 2014 when all the crap is sorted out and prices are down.

Isn't the Cloud computing a scam?

The whole "cloud" thing is a major gimmick. Especially with multiplatform games. The games need to be programmed to work offline without a cloud, and it would be ridiculous to change the function of a game to alternate between online where it uses the cloud and offline when it doesnt.

EDIT: (Can't edit on my tablet) Due to the changed rules of the Xbox, I'm staying with MS

First of all, here's a disclaimer: I'm not a programmer. I don't know everything about how games function. The following is just what I believe based on my potentially limited knowledge, and I would be absolutely [i]delighted[/i] if someone came and told my why I am wrong. That said. Let's lay out the fact. Running any program is basically taking a bunch of information, moving it to the processor, and processing it. What's supposed to be amazing about the cloud is that it supposedly has so much processing power that it can do tasks fast enough that couldn't be done fast enough on the console. Now, I'm sceptical, because there's a reason the internal transfer speeds of computers are in the order of hundreds of giga[i]bytes[/i] (not bits, this is very important), and latencies in the order of nano- to microseconds. And based on my understanding, it's either one of those (latency isn't so important if you have a huge data set, but small data sets require low latencies). Now let's consider internet connection speeds. According to speedtest.net, the global average for download speed is 14 mega[i]bits[/i] per second, and 5 Mbits/s for upload. As far as latency goes, I don't know the global average, but I'm under the impression that 50 milliseconds is a realistic latency to some server in a non-perfect scenario. As far as speed goes, the 5 Mb/s is what we need to play with because the information needs to be sent to the cloud, and the lowest speed will be the limiting speed. That five megabits is about 625 kilobytes, by the way. Now, what can we do with 625 kilobytes of data every second and 50 milliseconds of latency for each transfer? Well, first of all, if we are going to do any tasks that need updates on per frame basis, many next gen games seem to run at 60 fps, that's about 10 kilobytes of data per frame. To give some context, that ten kilobytes of data equals about 350 30-bit color pixels. But even if that speed wasn't the problem, it would be absolutely horrible for tasks that need updates every frame. That 50 milliseconds of latency assures that three frames have gone by before the data gets mack from the cloud. That's why cloud computing is absolutely useless for anything that requires fast updates (and high amounts of data). My problem is that with my limited knowledge, I don't know tasks that would require updates so seldom, with so little data, that it would actually be useful to process them in the cloud. Now obviously there are things like the driveatar of Forza Motorsport 5, that's a neat feature. But I don't think it's really enough to produce a noticeable improvement. If anyone who has an actual programming background could give me a couple of uses for cloud computing, I'd be thrilled. But as of now, to me, it seems more like a gimmick. Then again, as I said, I'm not a programmer, I'm by no means a professional, I just have my limited understanding of how computers and computer programs work.

No it won't be a -blam!-ing gimmick! What the hell? Of course it won't be! They're actually implementing it into games like Battlefield 4, Titan Fall and well that's about it, but still...

Well, I think the cloud features like sharing and logging in will be really useful. As for cloud processing, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Titanfall, which uses the cloud to compute AI, will be the first test for that feature.