The Next Evolution of Gaming
Technology advances at an incredible pace, and us gamers experience drastic changes in the world of gaming. From graphics to gameplay, and even a new sports branch, video games today are more than just games. They let artists express imagination in new ways by bringing it to life through high-end graphics. They challenge your cognition with strategic gameplay and team coordination, and they’re even a source of income for some.
Looking back, it’s hard to grasp the remarkable changes the industry has undegone. Consider Mortal Kombat I, the first of the later popular Mortal Kombat series. It was a successful game back in 1992, and introduced then-novel levels of violance, cruelty and gore. It weighed 5 megabytes, was 2-dimensional, pixelated and blurry, with an incomplete jump animation. Twenty-three years later, Mortal Kombat X weighs over 30 gigabytes and uses extremely detailed graphics and animations. The world is more immersive, the arenas feel real and the characters are much more relatable.
A whole new (connected) world
The evolution of the internet was another catalyst for change. Playing in a now-connected world added new dimensions to the expeirence of playing video games. Many features and models were altered and changed from the ground up. Single player games who used to be the standard, suddenly became the odd minority. Globalization allowed gamers from different corners of the world to play together, or against each other, and share joint experiences. Playing video games changed from a solitary activity to a social event among friends.
Even purchasing games has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. Back in the day, we used to visit the friendly neighborhood computer store and get an actual box copy of the game. Disks gave room to CDs, who then evolved to DVDs. Game manuals and installation guides (who used to be highly detailed book-like masterpieces) became smaller and fewer, and eventually vanished altogether. Today, in contrast, game sales are dominated by online stores. Over 90% of PC games are sold digitally through Steam, Blizzard, Ubisoft and other digital download platforms. The internet, (or what we often refer to as “the cloud”) had completely reshaped the industry, and how gamers experience buying and playing games.
The best part is that cloud technologies are still evolving. Processing power is cheaper and more accessible than ever, making once perceived insurmountable challenges finally solvable. New and exciting opportunities emerge, it’s a brave new (digital) world out there. The possibilities are endless.
The next evolutionary steps
In recent months, the chatter in the game industry mostly revolved around two major shifts that are starting to take shape. The first is the Game-as-a-Service (GaaS) model, and the second is playing without owning gaming hardware.
The former is a model shift. Instead of buying retail games for $60 upfront and getting the full experience, gamers would buy the initial game for a reduced price (or no upfront money at all), and dish out cash progressively as they play. This model is already used in many games today in the form of free-to-play economies, lootboxes and paid DLCs. This shift is already taking place, as more and more games use these new models (just ask EA).
The latter is a hardware ownership model shift. Uber lets people “rent” car services, and airbnb lets people “rent” accomedations. Sharing economy has already changed many aspects of our lives, from supercar ownership, to cloud servers and even elite fashion — renting expensive things and using them only when you need them makes a lot of sense. The gaming market, however, is still largely unchanged in that regard — we used to buy overpriced gaming hardware 20 years ago, and we still do it today. But an imminent change is starting to surge, new technological advances (more on that later) allow delivering great gaming experience on cloud-hosted gaming PCs. Industry leaders from the likes of Phil Spencer and EA executives attest to the inevitablability of Cloud Gaming taking a major role in game delivery.
Now, you might say — hey, this has been tried before. And you’ll be right — past attempts were made to make “high end gaming on any device” a reality, with OnLive being the most recognisable player. Their innovative Cloud Gaming service was announced back in 2009, and launched to market a year later. It had a lot of potential, but it just didn’t work well enough. OnLive pioneered the vision, but it never reached mass-market adoption and repeat use. Simply put, it failed to become a true alternative to buying a physical PC.
The failure of OnLive left many eager gamers scarred. The anticipation, hype and excitement gave way to anger and sarcasm. People who tried the service felt betrayed, that they were sold on a dream that was simply too good to be true (and it was).
(processing) power to the people!
OnLive made many mistakes (googling “why OnLive failed” yields over 600,000 results), but more than anything it was simply ahead of its time. Widespread streaming was just starting out (Netflix and Hulu began streaming just a year before), public cloud datacenter were scarce, and GPU technology didn’t support virtualization yet.
Compare that with today — FullHD and 4K streaming is ubiquitous, the average internet speed has tripled in the past 5 years, public data centers are spread all over the world, and compression technologies (specifically H.265) improved dramatically. Moreover, GPUs are significantly stronger and support high-density virtualization.
Back to the future
The secret to a great Cloud Gaming experience is making the gamer forget that the game he’s playing is running in the cloud. The technological advancements of recent years have finally made this high level of quality possible. Today, we can deliver stable and uninterruptible gaming experience that is crisp and smooth. A strong indication of how good the service became, is that many gamers already use cloud gaming services to play competitively. Play, and win!
Simplay and other similar services usher in a new era in Cloud Gaming, a resurgence. Our work is still cut out for us — heck, people still believe Cloud Gaming is a scam that never works. Debunking old sentiments and long-held beliefs would be challenging, indeed. But the vision first introduced by OnLive still makes perfect sense, it’s a vision worth fighting for. We believed in it then, we believe in it still, and we work hard on making it a reality.
