The Whisperings of Cloud Gaming

Many famous companies are well known and market leaders in the gaming fields. You have Sony who developed the PlayStation and Microsoft with their Xbox, and then giants in other areas, like Walmart, Google and Amazon, who are testing technology that could change our gaming lives forever.

This tech could influence how we buy, play and store our most treasured games and how shops sell and distribute to gamers all over the world. Some of the companies are a little louder than others when admitting to their experiments, but each company is aiming towards a future where clutter like discs and consoles aren’t required because they are planning to stream games like Netflix, Hulu and Showmax do – over the internet.

This technology is called cloud gaming, and in all honesty, it is not a new concept. Over the last ten years, people have turned their noses up and smirked at this brilliant idea, mainly due to financial hurdles, but after a decade of testing our dreams could come true, and cloud gaming could finally be introduced to the world!

So, what is it exactly?

Presently, we insert a disc into a console to play a game, that, or you download biggish files onto a drive. The processor your box sports inhibit the display and speed of your game. With the introduction of cloud gaming your box is in a library of servers far away and you stream games like you do videos on YouTube, only now, the compressed video frames respond to your inputs.

So when you want Mario to jump over a mushroom, you press the button associated with “jump”, and this message is sent to a remote server telling your game what you have done, which then sends you a new video frame. This can be likened to your body; if something stings or burns you, a message is sent to your brain, and your mind then sends a message back to that part of the body telling it to move away, only cloud gaming works with frames per second. Multiply the video frame by 30 or 60, and voila, you have a video!

Does this work?

Well, it does, and not only in test centres. The United States, as well as Europe and Japan, has been testing this for close on a decade, and it’s only getting more comfortable, quicker and more impressive.

This sounds familiar; hasn’t it already been tried?

As stated above, the streaming of games has been in existence for almost a decade, and never really died utterly. Nvidia hasn’t stopped testing variants of its streaming service since they began with the idea, and they are not the only ones. Many smaller competitors have yet to replace game consoles, Vortex and Shadow to name two, but with Microsoft, Google and possibly Amazon getting their fingers in the pie, the future of cloud gaming seems to be lined with silver.