Cloud gaming wants to change how you play
Remote data centers harness processing power to aid streaming
Imagine video gamers, untethered from their computers and consoles, playing crystal-clear versions of their favorite games anywhere. They might traverse the futuristic world of the sci-fi shooter game Halo on their mobile phones while riding the subway, or dust off old MacBook computers and hop straight into the jungle of the battle arena game League of Legends.
That’s the rosy future promised by cloud gaming, a nascent technology that could reshape how people play games. And depending on whom you ask, that future might have arrived already.
Facebook recently announced that it had expanded the reach of its cloud gaming platform, which was released last fall, to cover 98% of the mainland United States.
Also, Microsoft made its cloud gaming service available on more devices.
And Amazon broadened access to its burgeoning cloud service, giving Prime members a free trial version during its Prime Day last month.
It has been a busy period for the small but growing cloud gaming industry, which is expected to surpass $1 billion in revenue and 23 million paying customers by the end of this year, according to Newzoo, a gaming analytics firm. Revenue is projected to grow to more than $5 billion by 2023 as the technology improves.
“After years of development, now is a crucial time for cloud gaming to gain mainstream prominence,” said Rupantar Guha, a gaming analyst at the analytics company GlobalData.
Cloud gaming, at its core, is the ability to separate the technical power required to play a video game from the device it is being played on. That is accomplished
by using remote data centers, which harness a company’s processing power and stream a game directly to a user’s device.
That means games will no longer be tied to specific platforms or devices, so Halo could be played not only on an Xbox console but on a mobile phone or streamed directly to a television. Someone could use the power of the cloud to play a high-quality, graphicsintensive game on an older or weaker device.
That could lead people to spend less time and money on expensive video game consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, and to turn away from pricey gaming computers. They could theoretically play new games instantaneously on any device anywhere.
It sounds great in theory. But cloud gaming, which is still in an experimental phase, is sometimes bogged down by glitches that frustrate users. And it requires a strong local internet connection.
Cloud gaming could also shake up the supremacy that Sony, Microsoft and other hardware manufacturers have enjoyed in video games. Instead, tech giants like Google and Amazon are barreling in and “see this as a breakthrough opportunity to get into the global games market,” said Guilherme Fernandes, Newzoo’s cloud gaming expert.
The road has not been smooth. “Big Tech has a sense of arrogance that they can take over an industry segment and disrupt it entirely,” said Joost van Dreunen, a New York University professor who studies the business of video games. “So far in gaming, they all suck at that.”
Google was the first big tech company off the mark in cloud gaming, releasing its Stadia subscription service in November 2019. For $10 a month, subscribers could play the initial library of 22 games on their phones, Google Chrome web browsers or televisions, with a controller. People who chose free access to Stadia could buy games individually.
The service was immediately criticized for poor performance and a scarcity of games. Jack Buser, Stadia’s director of games, said the service had stabilized over time and now had more than 180 titles.
“There hadn’t been a new major entrant in the gaming space in 20 years,” Buser said. “It does give us an advantage to do something different in this industry and push it forward in a way that consoles can’t.”
Stadia has since gone through other ups and downs. While the blockbuster game Cyberpunk 2077, released in December, turned into a buggy mess on many older consoles, users reported smooth sailing on Stadia. But in February, Google announced that it would stop designing its own exclusive games for Stadia, and the service’s top games developer, Jade Raymond, left the company.
Buser declined to comment on February’s changes.
Amazon also unveiled a cloud service, Luna, in September. It is