It’s been a fair amount of time since Google used a battering ram in the form of their 2019 Gaming Announcement to declare that they’re about to change the industry forever. Declaring that they have cracked the code and have the power to deliver triple-A games through cloud-based streaming, people were ready to write off the standardised format of gaming on dedicated hardware.
On 19 November 2019, Stadia launched, and the discussion quickly pivoted from calling it revolutionary gaming tech to how wrong Google got it with their grossly undercooked product. Still, two years on, other companies have made strides. Still, as noted by the TechCrunch 2020 cloud gaming piece, even a correctly launched product in gaming would take a long time to take hold.
So, two years on from Stadia’s launch, is cloud gaming still the future of the games industry?
There are undeniable benefits to cloud-based gaming
The xCloud, Amazon’s Luna, and Stadia have all experienced varying degrees of success, but at the core of each platform, there’s the opportunity to make gaming more accessible. By removing hardware and processing requirements, if the business model aligns, the high-price gateway to top-class gaming can be removed. In this regard, a subscription, Netflix-esque model should be implemented, as Xbox has with xCloud.
While this is still tech being developed, as demonstrated by xCloud only recently rolling out Xbox Cloud Gaming to Xbox consoles and Stadia being without many of its features, it is already being implemented for gamers. Perhaps the starkest application so far has been with the portable gaming devices of Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck.
While there are marvels of porting to the Switch, such as with The Witcher III, the likes of Control and Guardians of the Galaxy are now available on the popular hybrid console by virtue of cloud streaming. Steam Deck, arguably, is going another step further, wiping out further costs of expensive PC gaming hardware to cater to cloud gaming but still with powerful hardware for offline, portable play of PC titles.
Roadblocks in the way of cloud gaming
The first issue is simple: cloud gaming relies on all of its potential customers to have high-quality internet connections. Issues like video compression, bandwidth, always-online demands of some titles, and latency have notoriously been problems for the masses so far. Naturally, cloud gaming companies would be wise to turn to performance monitoring software like the SolarWinds RDS monitoring as it offers a unified view to optimise workflow; however, this may take a while to act on in regards to the massive cloud gaming platforms.
As much as the platforms take on a great deal of the processing clout themselves, performance with low-speed internet will remain a problem for many of the same people who the product is targeting. Cloud gaming is pitched as the hyper-accessible way to play the biggest releases, but without a hefty amount of bandwidth, it’s perhaps more inaccessible than console gaming.
Stadia alone requires at least 35 Mbps of network speed for games to run at the optimum 4K resolution and 10 Mbps or greater at a minimum. The Fastmetrics speed map puts the UK average internet speed at 13 Mbps. Naturally, internet speeds are regularly improving, and the advent of 5G will almost certainly alleviate some of these issues, but the point remains: much of the target audience are still unable to access cloud gaming.
When executed well and to its fullest – which is yet to be seen – cloud gaming could very well change how we go about playing video games. For now, however, it’s mostly a novelty for enthusiasts and those with strong internet connections.
