What is Cloud Gaming?
Cloud gaming is a new way of playing high-quality video games with the use of remote servers in data centers. It is also known as Game streaming. There is no need to download and install games on a local machine or console. Instead, streaming services require a strong internet connection to send gaming information to an app or browser installed on the recipient device. The game is rendered and played on the remote server, but the user sees and interacts with everything locally on their machine. Most services support PC, Mac, and Android devices, with iOS development lagging in Game Streaming.
How does Cloud Gaming works?
Cloud gaming services usually provide dedicated or web-based apps to stream games. It’s just like Prime/Netflix or other streaming platforms. The only difference is that, the server where the video stream is coming from can also choose and respond to your inputs.
When you start running a game through a cloud gaming service, rather than sticking a hard drive in your local machine or booting up an app you have installed, a server acts as a high-powered PC somewhere and appears that for you, streaming a feed of the game from hundreds of miles away.
Take Google Stadia as an example, which uses proprietary tech based on Linux. When one logs into the service and picks a game to play, a super-powerful server at one of the company’s data centers starts running it.
The server then sends a feed of that game running from the data center to the machines where one can interact with it via an input device, the service logs inputs and sends them back to the server, which then carries them out and streams the result back to the machine.
Regardless of the input method, the principle remains the same. The services run a game on a server, log your inputs remotely, and stream back the result.
Advantages and Disadvantages
There is a lot of cool stuff about cloud gaming that makes it so popular these days amongst the gaming communities and provides new opportunities to the gaming industries. The users can be benefited, from cloud-based subscription models due to their simplicity of use and convenience.
No Need for expensive hardware investments: The player does not need to buy expensive gaming equipment. The restriction caused by memory, graphics, and processing power decreases with cloud solutions and provides users an excellent gaming experience.
Security: Users can log in to their subscription, search for a game in the library of available orders, and immediately begin streaming the game.
Cross-Platform: The games that are intended for the PC and Consols can easily be played on smartphones. Cloud gaming makes the game platform independent.
Location Independence: Cloud gaming allows the user to play games irrespective of location. It is mainly helpful for those gamers who travel a lot and cannot take powerful computers with them.
As every coin has two faces, cloud gaming also has some disadvantages. Some of them are-
- It requires a good internet connection without any issue.
- Gamers can’t play high-end games, even with a 4G internet connectivity in most locations.
- Cloud-gaming services will always have more latency than powerful local hardware.
- Cloud games are a bit expensive.
Future
Cloud-based gaming is beneficial for both customers and companies. It eliminates the requirement of carrying the console and provides them speedy access to multiple games through laptops, smartphones, desktops.
Some services like Google Stadia and GeForce Now are already available to the public that is just a matter of a point before game streaming cuts out a large part of the gaming industry. Companies that are working on cloud gaming so far are
- Microsoft
- NVIDIA
- EA (Electronic Arts)
- Sony
- Nintendo, etc
Conclusion
Users don’t have to purchase new hardware every few years to run the latest and most prominent games. The other is that it theoretically enables users to play any game on any machine with a display screen and a good internet connection. But If everyone played games using cloud services, bandwidth usage would increase dramatically. So it has both pros and cons. But companies like Google, NVIDIA, etc are creating technologies that will help in evolving the future of cloud gaming.
With the above story, one can easily divine the future of cloud gaming.
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