The gaming industry has never been stronger, and it’s expected to grow exponentially in the years to come. In its current incarnation, gaming usually involves the use of hardware, especially consoles, to run the game. Cloud computing, however, has opened up new avenues for gamers to enjoy games around the clock via streaming services.
In a recent article for WebProNews, reporter Mike Tuttle wrote that many companies are now looking past just multi-platform games and are moving more toward real cross-platform experiences, especially with the rise of tablets and mobile devices. The cloud makes it possible to do away with the traditional PC and console setup, and offers entrance into a new world of gaming on mobile devices.
Xbox One Embraces Cloud
Even if a gamer still wants to use a traditional console, cloud computing technology has improved the way the game looks and reacts to your movements. Microsoft’s announcement in May about the upcoming release of the Xbox One showed how cloud computing can vastly improve the traditional game console.
The Xbox One will be connected to a 300,000-server cloud architecture. This architecture will help make your virtual experience more realistic. There’s always been a lag between your reactions and what your avatar does on screen, and these effects require a lot of computation. Microsoft calls this the “latency-insensitive computation.” Microsoft believes that these computations can be easily off-loaded to the cloud without any additional lag time. Static effects like light in a forest can also be uploaded to the cloud without damaging overall game quality.
Microsoft has gone so far as to claim that cloud computing will make its Xbox One four times more powerful than traditional game consoles. That has yet to be seen, but adding cloud computing to a very traditional game setup may be a model for the future.
Sony Gets in the Game
In response to Microsoft’s Xbox One, Sony has promised that its new PlayStation 4 will also do cloud computing. Sony claims that its PS4 will have the ability to off-load certain computations to the cloud. But the PS4 also will have another advantage: you will be able to stream games using the cloud-based Gaikai streaming technology.
Sony purchased Gaikai in July 2012, but the cloud gaming services won’t be available to PS3 and PS4 owners until 2014.
Will All Games Move to the Cloud?
While gamers would love the opportunity to stream games on any device and ditch traditional consoles, this dream won’t likely happen for a few years. The gaming industry is still having trouble actually defining what cloud computing means to them, and the streaming technology still needs to catch up to 24/7 cloud-based gaming.
Developers, however, are driving hard to make this a reality, but it will still take time to figure out what can and can’t be done on a gaming cloud computing platform. FBN
Mike Goodenough is global director of cloud field engineering for savvisdirect at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.