You are having your breakfast. It’s a sunny morning, and you turn on your phone and tap on YouTube to check out what’s trending. A video titled “Elden Ring-The Horrifying Implications of a Name” catches your eye. You are 100% convinced about playing Elden Ring when you watch the video. But then reality hits you. You don’t own a Beefy PC or a Console. What would you do? How will you play Elden Ring? With the ever-expensive PC market and the tensions surrounding the shortages of the latest consoles, speaking in financial terms, buying the required hardware isn’t an optimal solution. So what should you do? Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to present to you Cloud Gaming. Cloud Gaming might come off as an odd term to you now, but I’ll try my best to explain it, and by the end, we’ll conclude if it’s the imminent future of video gaming.
Now, what is Cloud Gaming, you may ask? Cloud Gaming is a system of playing Video Games online with the help of the internet. It uses remote data servers to run your video games. All you need is just a reliable connection, and that’s it. With this, you can game on any device available. It is similar to working with a streaming platform like Netflix or Amazon Prime, while in their case, they stream the show/movie. Here you can stream an AAA video game. How fascinating is that! With this you, you don’t need that shiny RT3090 or the Flashy PS5, just grab your Mobile phone and start playing. If you like to play on a bigger screen, grab your work desktop(please don’t play games on your work desktop), and if you desire to play on something much bigger, your TV is always here to stay. Streaming services like PlayStation Now and Nvidia GeForce Now are currently providing this service to customers. Google Stadia can also be mentioned here but the service has seen multiple halts, the biggest one occurring in February 2021.
We have figured out what Cloud gaming is, and now onto the question you must have had at the back of your mind,“ How does this work”? So you pay for the subscription, which can be monthly or half-yearly, or yearly, depending upon the service provider. You have to purchase the games from each of their respective stores, and then you can start your cloud gaming journey. So essentially, what happens is that you borrow a small amount of horsepower from a supercomputer, i.e., the data center. The data center is a powerful gaming pc, and all you do in cloud gaming is use its power while gaming. All the latest hardware, from your controllers to your smartphone, is compatible with cloud gaming. You can even use the on-screen controls if you want to. The server handles the task of rendering and playing the game and then sends it over to your device, which then can be played. The player’s inputs then travel back to the server, forming a two-way data exchange.
Cloud Gaming has several advantages over the usual hardware we need to play our games. Cloud Gaming is mobile and flexible. You can simply try out the latest and greatest in the gaming world. You don’t require expensive consoles or a big fat PC rig to try out the latest AAA titles. Another advantage is you do not have to download anything. You can simply turn on your phone and start playing, saving the headache of reserving space for games. Finally, its most important highlight is its price. There is no need to shell out $1000 bucks for that RTX 3090. It requires a price as low as $6 (Amazon Luna for instance) under a subscription model. Now you can go and calculate how that fares.
Nothing is error-free in this world, and such is the case with Cloud Gaming. While what I have said earlier might sound like an absolute dream to some, it isn’t always like that. It has dwindled its popularity and has pushed back its growth—the latency issues, especially in India, where not many have access to High-Speed Internet. Even if we left that issue aside, Cloud Gaming does suffer from compressed video quality, which might bother many. Top it off with the unlimited bandwidth required even to play these games, and you are left with a tech that has the potential yet isn’t mature yet.
This brings us to the question,“ is it the future of gaming ?” The answer is yes and no. While it does have its advantages, currently, as of this writing, the tech isn’t stable yet. Google’s Stadia, one of the forerunners in the cloud gaming space, is almost on the verge of its death. No surprises, though, since it missed its sales mark by a massive margin. All of this tells us a story, even though the competition to control this new market has emerged, none of them has left a lasting impression. I wouldn’t call fresher services like Xbox’s cloud or GeForce Now a failure, but we can hardly call them success compared to how well they’re performing. I would like to conclude by saying that Cloud Gaming has a bright future, too. But it needs to mature and evolve, it would take a decade, but it’ll get there eventually. One day, we’ll see a crowd of video game enthusiasts jumping onto these services. 5G access to everyone will be the starter for that to happen. For now, though, let’s just consider this a testing phase.
