Behind the Scenes of the ‘Play’ Button: a Comparison with Netflix
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(7-minute read)
We’ve previously talked about how cloud gaming plays a crucial role in content discovery to provide a good experience. But what about the experience while you are consuming that content?
There are many ways to enjoy a song or a movie. From a user’s standpoint, the way to consume music or films is by pressing the ‘Play’ button, but no further interaction is required beyond pausing, rewinding or regulating volume. In this sense, you can have dinner in front of the TV or enjoy a song in the car because it allows you to carry out other activities at the same time. In other words, non-gaming content can be “passively” consumed. However, when it comes to video games, this type of content needs your full attention. You will hardly be able to play a video game while having dinner or driving, because the way to consume the video game is by actively interacting with it. In cloud gaming, once you find a game that catches your attention and you click the “Play” button, the jamming begins, and this is really when user experience is put to the test.
For film or music streaming platforms, one could say that the main challenge relies on making sure that the content is good, so that users find the platform appealing enough to stick around (which is not a minor challenge either). However, an interactive experience, such as playing a video game, brings additional challenges that gaming streaming platforms have to face in order to provide users with an experience that works like a Swiss watch.
To make this explanation as easy to understand as possible, we’re going to compare these challenges with a streaming platform that is familiar to you and distributes passively-consumed content: Netflix. To do this, let’s break them down into the three main stages that any user would go through when watching a movie, in the case of Netflix, or playing a game, in the case of Nware:
- Getting Ready: Before the user starts the streaming session
- Pressing ‘Play’: When the user is waiting to access the streaming session
- Game On: When the user is playing the game/watching the TV show
Let’s take a look at each one of these stages:
1. Getting Ready: Before the user starts the streaming session:
Before users can even access the content they want to watch, Netflix must first ensure all of its infrastructure is in place. Netflix’s strategy consists of deploying small servers called “CDN servers” (Content Delivery Network), which are lighter than datacenters and are widely distributed across the world. The main function of CDNs is to bring the audiovisual files from the datacenter to a location that is close to the users.
However, because of the way networks are built, there is always a risk that users may be assigned to the wrong CDN after pressing ‘Play’. If this were to happen, Netflix has so many CDNs placed around the world that the pain caused to users, if any, would be minimal: only a couple more seconds waiting at the loading screen.
In the case of cloud gaming, if the user gets assigned to the wrong location, those two seconds of delay will continue throughout the entire gameplay and completely ruin the experience. On top of that, the content distributed in cloud gaming is not only an audiovisual file that you can easily send through the network, but rather a persistent live video stream with which users interact, which requires high computing power to run the game. This computing power is something that CDNs are incapable of attaining, which reinforces the need to assign users to the correct location in the first place.
2. Pressing ‘Play’: When the user is waiting to access the streaming session:
After a user presses ‘Play’ in cloud gaming, two crucial things must happen:
- First, cloud gaming platforms reserve a “space” in their cloud servers with the sufficient hardware resources (i.e. a gaming machine) for each user. If you’ve ever built your own gaming PC and assembled the RAM, GPU, CPU and Hard Drive components (I certainly did), then you know that it takes a long time. In this case, every time a user clicks the ‘Play’ button, a virtual PC is built with the required specs to run the selected game smoothly. The main challenge relies in setting everything up in a matter of seconds.
- Secondly, the gaming machines available have to be wisely distributed between both newcomers and recurring users. Here the main challenge is to develop a system that perfectly balances the supply of servers and the demand of users.
The challenge in this section is actually non-existent in the case of Netflix, so there is not much of a comparison here. This is because, to be able to watch a movie, you don’t need to reserve a virtual space with computing power to execute the movie, as it is only a “readable” file (not an “executable” file).
3. Game On: When the user is playing the game/watching the TV show:
In order to provide a good video quality on all devices, Netflix compresses their content for different screen resolutions, aspect ratios and file sizes. However, since this is a very demanding and costly operation, Netflix performs this task much earlier than the release date. As an example, Netflix compressed the master file of the show ‘Stranger Things — Season 2’ into 9,570 different video, audio, and text files that were later distributed among all their CDN locations. After this step, Netflix streams its content using existing network protocols, codecs and tech standards that have been around since early 2000’s. In addition, challenges like network latencies and bad connections are easily solved by simply including a “buffer”, so that if the content ever gets lost in the network, they can just resend it.
In cloud gaming, however, content cannot be previously compressed, stored and distributed, or resent if it gets lost, since again, the content is interactive. In addition, cloud gaming platforms can’t use the advantages that a buffer brings against latencies and network losses.
These disadvantages generate new challenges and needs that are not present in passively-consumed streaming platforms, all of which require new solutions on the part of cloud gaming platforms: 1) compressing video on-demand, 2) sending this information in real time while dealing with network latencies and losses, and 3) running the game as smooth as butter. Failing to tackle these challenges will result in a poor experience, so let’s see how Nware responds to each of these separately.
1) Compressing video on-demand:
2) Sending information in real time while dealing with network latencies and losses:
3) Running the game as smooth as butter:
If you’ve read up to this point, you may have learned that cloud gaming platforms face many technological challenges just because gaming content is consumed in an interactive way AND streamed in real time. Cloud gaming is not “a technology” like AI or Blockchain, but rather a stack of technologies, all orchestrated to provide a specific gaming experience. The good news is that tackling these challenges raises huge technological barriers to entry, thus, decreasing the size of the competitive landscape and increasing opportunities for existing platforms.
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I hope you enjoyed this content, and I would be thrilled to hear your feedback.
See you on the next drizzle!
Daniel Olmedo — Co-Founder & CEO
Begoña Fernández-Cid — Co-Founder & CMO
