If you’ve scrolled through the Xbox Live dashboard in the last couple days, you’ve seen Xbox Live Labs, a free to download app for your 360 that runs network tests on your console and home internet. According to Major Nelson, Xbox Live Labs is designed to “perform[s] a number of network tests from your console to Xbox LIVE. These results are recorded solely for the purpose of testing and improving the service.”
Having downloaded Labs last night and let it run for an hour, I was surprised to find Avatar awards and Achievements as part of the package (even if they’re worth zero points). There are three levels of testing, which essentially amounts you having to wait 30 minutes, an hour, and six hours. Similar to Sony’s Folding@Home, I let my system run and went and did something else.
But while I was waiting, I got to thinking: what would cause Microsoft to develop a program with fully featured elements like Achievement and Avatar unlocks simply to test the network? Why would they want to position Live Labs as a pseudo-game (and I use that term loosely) to get people to download it? Clearly they’re trying to benchmark network performance around the U.S.
That got my spider sense a-tingling. Microsoft never needed to test network latency when they launched Netflix or ESPN360.
With the recent report of IPTV finally, maybe coming to Xbox 360, perhaps Live Labs is a precursor to its launch? Perhaps. I also think it could be serving to pave the way for a service like OnLive or Gaikai to come to the Xbox 360 dahsboard. If Live Labs is testing individual users’ home connections, it’s possible that Microsoft is attempting to create a heat map of geography to see how regions handle latency. Obviously, latency is a big killer to experiences like OnLive, where input lag and visual fidelity downgrades can hamper the end user; the closer to a data center a user is, the better their performance. Given OnLive’s position in the marketplace as a service for all major publishers, it seems unlikely that they would strike a deal that would demand platform exclusivity with Microsoft.
But in light of the recent PS3 cloud storage move from Sony, maybe Microsoft is planning to invest heavily in their own cloud gaming service or storage solution. It would be an interesting move, certainly, even if it isn’t manifested until the next Xbox debuts. Xbox Live games being playable from the cloud would alleviate a lot of the license management that happens when you download something to your console (i.e., games you buy are tied to your system, and if your hard drive ever goes down, you’re forced to redownload that content).
Finally, there’s the Gaikai angle. Gaikai is promising a one-click solution for demos, whereby players can simply hit a button, and the demo pops up on-screen, be it on console or on the internet through your PC. Gaikai promises that you can get a taste of a game without having to download anything, and once you’re done, it’s back to standard operating procedure. A service like this would require a certain amount of bandwidth to deliver the game demo experience to the user (which this test could potentially be used for), but I very much like the idea of not having to wait for a demo to download before playing it. Imagine if you could simply click the demo box on the XBL dashboard, play it, and then jump into whatever other activity you want.
Of course I could just be jumping to conclusions. Maybe all Microsoft wants to do is really improve how fast the current Xbox Live really is. If so, they’ve created a nice-looking test app and not much more, other than a way to give away meaningless zero-point achievements. They clearly had a designer on the project, which speaks to me as an omen of things to come.
Jagex is a company that is no stranger to the MMO market. Known primarily for the somewhat free-to-play game, Runescape, the developer undoubtedly has a fair amount of experience under its belt.
