Traditionally Gaming has been dominated by Consoles, Mobiles, and PC hardware and all these three Options require a lot of initial investment from the player’s end, Cloud gaming can solve this issue.
let’s deep dive into cloud Gaming and understand the fundamentals.
Let’s Start with Basics: What’s cloud gaming?
Cloud gaming, generally known as gaming on-demand or gaming-as-a-service, that runs the games on datacenters and streams those games to a consumer’s gadget.
How does It work?
Cloud gaming function similar to On-demand Video or Music service Providers, but in this case the communications is 2 way (Instead of One-way video Streaming), since the game requires Player inputs, the critical factor in Cloud gaming is Having Minimal to Low latency, and this factor only will determine the success of Cloud Gaming.
Technical requirements for Cloud Gaming
A Stable and Fast internet connection is of utmost importance, and the availability of cloud data centers near the end-user can help mitigate the latency issues, which means a huge amount of initial investment is required from the service Providers’ end, which may deter players from entering developing markets.
Cloud Game service Providers will Rely heavily on the Internet service Providers as the gaming experience will depend heavily on the quality of internet the Service Provider can provide, this is an area of concern.
The Pros of Cloud Gaming
The player can access their games library anytime and from any device, and the initial investment required to enter the gaming scene will be lower which will attract a large number of customers into the service, and instant delivery / Release of newer games will make the games more reachable.
Possible Technical Solutions to the challenges of Cloud Gaming
1. Adaptive graphic’s processing unit (GPU) resource scheduling in the cloud will help Offload the load from one datacenter/server to another server/ Datacenter
2. Algorithms to predict a participant’s subsequent inputs in an ongoing game and Pre-processing the results Overhand, which will help mitigate any latency in gaming Controls.
Conclusion
As for now, Cloud gaming would be a “Work in progress” for some time as the network situation cannot ensure a constant network speed required by the game service Providers, However, things might change with 5G, as it promises lower latency than traditional networks, which will eliminate the requirement of placing datacenters near the End users / Consumers and which will, in turn, reduce the initial Overhead cost of the games service providers.
With 5G just around the corner, it is surely a very exciting time for gaming,
