What even is “Cloud Gaming”??
Often heralded as the “future of gaming”, cloud gaming is a completely different way to enjoy your favourite video games. For little to no money you can get access to essentially a high end gaming PC to enjoy a limitless selection of games from anywhere, on any device. Want to play the latest COD on your phone? No?.. Well I wouldn’t either, but you certainly can with the magic of cloud gaming.
History / Concept
To be clear though, cloud gaming as a concept – or a service – isn’t exactly new. My first interaction with the idea was in 2009 with OnLive, a cloud gaming service that let you play a small selection of games they were able to licence, all from their servers. They ended up selling their patents to Sony after going under in 2012, but even OnLive wasn’t the first. A startup called G-Cluster demonstrated at the 2000 E3 show, and launched in 2005. They left the game streaming market in 2010 to focus of IPTV – but that means the concept has been kicking around for two decades now.
Basic premise
The basic premise of cloud gaming is pretty simple. Instead of doing the hard work of rendering the 3D world of your game on your local machine, which would require an expensive gaming PC or console, hefty power bills, lots of noise and heat, and you are tied to that large and heavy machine, what if you did that hard work on a server in a data centre, and just sent the video feed to your local device? That would mean you could use anything that can connect to the internet and display video to play. Pair a controller or keyboard and mouse and you are all set. No big heavy gaming PC or laptop, just an internet connection. Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? You can see why it is seen as “the future of gaming” – where there is no hardware you need to buy, just an app.
Different approaches
It’s worth noting that there are quite a few different approaches to the cloud gaming business model, which change quite a lot about how you use them and how useful they are outright. Generally the most common method is for the service provider to essentially just provide the hardware, and you bring the games. A service like Shadow actually gives you an entire Windows operating system to play with, and it’s up to you to install whatever games services such as Steam, Epic Games or GOG to actually play games with. This has its advantages – there aren’t any compatibility issues, if you want to say record your gameplay you can do it on their hardware in the background, and of course if you’d rather edit videos or develop your own games, you can install Premiere or Unreal Engine and use the power of their hardware to do just that.
NVIDIA’s GeForce Now service is one step down from Shadow in terms of control. They have games pre-installed, and you pick which game you want to play, but you’ll have to log into your Steam or Epic or EA or Ubisoft accounts to prove you own the games before you can actually play anything. So you are still playing “your” games, ie the ones you already own through the various game platforms, but you’re just playing on NVIDIA’s hardware.
Something like PC Game Pass from Microsoft is completely different. By paying the subscription fee, you get access to the entire library of streamable games AND Microsoft’s hardware to render those games. You don’t need to own any of them already, you don’t need to log into a Steam account, you can just start playing. The upside to this is pretty obvious – you pay a single, relatively low fee, and you get both a large games library and the ability to play those games on basically any device. The downside is that unlike Shadow or GeForce Now where you still own all the games you are playing, and can therefore change how you play the games any time you want – as in swap between Shadow and GeForce Now, or start playing them locally on a gaming PC, if you stop paying for the Game Pass, you not only lose access to the hardware, but the games library too.
Google’s now defunct cloud gaming platform, Stadia, is a great example of how dystopian these services can be. Not only did you have to use Google’s hardware, but you had to purchase the games on Stadia. I don’t mean you had to buy the game on Steam and link your account, no Google licensed all the games they had and you were buying a separate copy that would only ever work on Stadia. Even if you owned the game already, you had to buy it again on Stadia. Now to their credit, if you did pay for the pro subscription they did give you access to a decent number of games for as long as you were subscribed, and when they shuttered operations they refunded a great deal of the costs users incurred. Still, the idea of having to buy games that are locked to a single platform that could – and did – go away at any moment never sat right with me, and I’m glad few have tried to emulate that business model.
Benefits
While I have mentioned some of the benefits already, I think it’s good to clarify why so many users and companies are interested in cloud gaming. From a user perspective it really boils down to convenience – both in usage and in cost. Let’s face it, a gaming PC is expensive. Gaming laptops really start at £1000 or so and they get obsolete worryingly quickly – especially the lower end ones. Desktops aren’t much better, and of course both of those are really tied to more conventional spaces like desks and literally tied to wall outlets most of the time. The idea that you can fire up any game you want on your phone, TV, tablet or basic laptop is really appealing to the more casual gamers. The fact these services have little to no upfront costs means you can dive straight in without ever having to splash out on a console or PC, and for those that outright can’t afford that, especially the services that offer a free tier like GeForce Now might well be some people’s only chance to play some games.
Drawbacks
There are of course some drawbacks to cloud gaming services too, including as I’ve already mentioned the lack of ownership especially on platforms like Game Pass. If you can’t afford the monthly subscription, you lose access to not only your gaming machine, but the games themselves. You can’t borrow a laptop from a friend for a while or scrape together enough to build an optiplex special gaming PC, because you don’t have any of your games to play. At least with services like Shadow and GeForce Now, since they use your own accounts you still have access to your games library, regardless of access to their service.
The arguably bigger issues revolve around the fact that the game is being rendered on a server a considerable distance from you and delivering the video feed back to you over the internet. The speed of light through fibre is actually a factor here, and of course the many servers and routers between you and the server, and that it is the round-trip latency from you sending an input to you seeing that input come back. The best case for that latency is normally between 80 and 100ms, with some services taking more like 150 to 300ms to register an input. For context, a mouse click on a local gaming PC in something like CSGO generally takes 20 to 30 ms – so even the best cloud gaming services I’ve tested are triple or quadruple the delay. That makes playing any latency sensitive games – first person shooters, rhythm games and even combat and sports games – very difficult, and often hard to enjoy. That isn’t something that can be easily improved without someone like NVIDIA putting GeForce Now servers basically on every street corner, which of course isn’t exactly economically viable. For the right games it can be perfectly fine, but for a lot of games it’s a worse experience.
Then there is the internet connection aspect – while you aren’t tethered to a wall outlet, you are essentially tethered to your home WiFi. You need not only enough bandwidth – as in a connection that is fast enough to download the new video frames on the fly – but one that is stable enough to consistently deliver that video feed, and relay your inputs back. While I’m sure 4G or 5G while stationary can be capable of that, especially while moving – or for example in-flight WiFi – won’t be sufficient for a reasonable experience. That’s a pretty big deal, and something you’ll need to consider when it comes to cloud gaming.
The Future
As for what’s ahead of us, that is always difficult to predict. The main console platforms – that being Xbox and PlayStation – have been rumoured to be going cloud-only for their next generation, although that line has been published for I think the last two generations so I’m not sure how much stock I put into that idea. I could imagine Microsoft launching a “lite” style console that is just a streaming box, but I’d expect it’ll still be a while (if ever) that they get rid of the ‘full fat’ console option. While I think cloud gaming serves a well deserved niche, I don’t believe it will ever fully replace local hardware – at least with our current hardware paradigm.
