Does the future of video games lie in the cloud ?

For a few years now, many “Cloud-gaming” offers have been emerging on the web. Cloud Gaming allows you to play the most graphics-intensive games anywhere and with any device, just with an internet connection. Run GTA V on your cell phone? It’s possible today, or rather it’s technically possible. So how does this technology work? We are confronted with it every day without knowing it, the principle is very simple: you play a video game like you watch a YouTube video, but in the cloud. The game is launched on a powerful external server by the provider, and we have access to the “screen of this server”. Through our internet connection, our mouse clicks are recorded and transmitted to the server using our internet connection, which sends us back the live image: it’s like watching a live stream. So yeah, with cloud gaming, you can run any game, even with a PC dating from 2010. The promises are great, but where does this technology fit in?

Some Great Deals

Cloud gaming services are on the rise. In 2020, the global market was worth $612.31 million, and is expected to be worth more than $5370 million in 2026 according to MORDOR Intelligence, with an estimated CAGR of 45.2% (CAGR means Compound Annual Growth Rate). Major companies in the video game industry are interested in it, such as Nvidia, Microsoft via its XBOX, Sony via its PS4/PS5 or Amazon with its “Amazon Luna” service, still in the development phase. The actors of the cloud sector do not propose the same offers: while Xbox and Sony propose a catalog of games directly accessible “for free” with the premium subscription, Nvidia and its GeForce now service requires to buy and own its own games to be able to use them on the service (subscription also paying). Another use case, the French startup Shadow differs from its competitors by offering “cloud computing” rather than cloud gaming. The difference? Cloud computing provides full access to the computer, thus becoming a second personal computer. The offer is therefore open to professionals, for example graphic designers who need a machine equipped with new generation graphics cards with high computing power. Mobility, simplicity of use, the promises are great and could represent the future of gaming and the PC. So, do these services meet all their promises?

A Young Market

Another technology leader also took the gamble on cloud gaming – and not the least – Google with its “Stadia” service, an offer 100% in the cloud with a console sold separately, but not mandatory to use the service. Just two years after the release of Stadia, Google announced in September 2022 the closure of its service and a partial refund to its customers. How to explain such a decision? From its launch in November 2019, the project is in trouble: lag, image compression, poor sound quality and input problem (the response time when clicking a button on the controller was much too high to be usable on online games), the defects were indeed numerous, far from the promises of Google to be able to play properly with an ordinary internet connection. These problems seem to be inherent to cloud gaming and do not only concern Stadia: the distance to the datacenters, the stability of the internet connection, or the number of players connected simultaneously strongly affect the gaming experience. Stadia’s business model is also questionable: there are no games included in the basic subscription, so you have to buy games directly from the Stadia platform, and at full price.

So yes, cloud gaming can do wonders, but there are many prerequisites to have a smooth gaming experience.

What we can expect from Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming is not yet a mature enough technology to provide all users with a satisfying gaming experience. However, the potential is definitely there: being able to play on all your devices (phone, Windows or Mac) with a powerful computer. Can we expect a democratization of the service in the near future with a reliable service? A team of researchers tested Starlink, an internet provider via satellite. Based on the results obtained, between 46 milliseconds and 52 milliseconds of latency on average, the latency seems too high for cloud gaming. However, the ping variations are much lower than with traditional providers. An improvement of the service and a reduction of the average latency could allow in the future a compatibility with cloud gaming. Moreover, the satellite service could really allow to play anywhere in the world, no matter the quality of the local network ( in the current conditions, it is impossible to play in the cloud in rural areas, which are often not equipped with optical fibre).

The presence on the market of companies such as Nvidia (which already has its own graphics card) or Amazon (which has its own servers) who are investing heavily in the market may allow the service to be perfected and to correct by the way some of the problems that make it difficult to use these services reliably today. The shortage of components that affects semiconductors also raises questions and leads us to review our way of consuming video game content, in addition to ecological issues: the cloud and the mutualization of PCs / servers may allow to optimize the power consumption and to reduce the polluting production of the components. If 2 people do not play at the same time, 1 computer in the cloud is enough for 2. But for this, the market actors will have to find solutions to reduce as much as possible the ecological impact of these technologies which are very polluting today, and thus answer the stakes of the 21st century with a dematerialization on the agenda, but always more polluting.