The Enablement of Cloud Gaming by Enterprise Technologies
I’m not the first person, nor will I be the last to be wowed by a game running smoothly without any visible hardware. This has not always been the case, and in some cities worldwide, it’s still not a viable option.
By today’s standards, previous examples of cloud gaming could be considered alpha versions, more than a product. That’s because the quality of gameplay differed so broadly on a game-to-game basis, that you couldn’t reliably call it a finished product. There also weren’t enough associated exclusive deals or partnerships with major publishers to make the package more appealing for consumers.
For more information on the history of cloud gaming, I highly recommend this article from Polygon: “Cloud gaming’s history of false starts and promising reboots”.
Leading entertainment brands like Netflix, Spotify, YouTube and Twitch couldn’t possibly deliver the quality of their services without using the cloud. Although video and music streaming is impressive, they’re far from being the benchmark of what the cloud can do nowadays.
The next generation of cloud-based game streaming has already started, and its players are Google Stadia, Microsoft xCloud, Nvidia GeForce Now, PlayStation Now and Amazon’s Luna. Their services will stretch the limits of cloud streaming technology and most likely evolve it further than we could have predicted.
Gaming on the cloud is highly reliant on internet speed, as all the processing is handled by data centres or the engines of creation, as I like to call them. Therefore, game optimizations are required for each platform in question. It’s not as easy as taking the game files and splitting them into different data centre processing hubs and expecting a finished product.
We can clearly paint a picture, in which developers must make at least twice the number of optimizations to their games. Doubling the amount of test and development environments, to guarantee a quality product on both local machines and cloud-hosted versions.
Creating and distributing video games is a lucrative business and growing at a record pace. With Stadia, PSN, xCloud, and Luna’s launch, we will have developers and publishers looking to urgently move to the cloud, if not there already, to capture the newly established segment of the market.
The future of gaming is shaping itself as an always-online, interactive medium; cloud gaming is just the natural next step, significantly reducing the barrier of entry but also allowing for instant connectivity with millions of players.
The public cloud has never been more affordable, efficient, and secure than it is now. From hosting production workloads to backups and even DevOps solutions, I can only recommend it.
About the Author:
Samuel Stan is an IT consultant here at Version 1.
