It’s an increasingly popular topic of discussion whenever I’m around other game industry enthusiasts. And most people seem to have a clear opinion, or at least certain embedded feelings regarding this current development. Most are still not paying it any real attention, but it takes little demonstration to exemplify just how powerful this new technology and pure innovation is. While it may not pose any real threat to the status quo currently, like any disruptive innovation before it, it holds the potential to completely change the face of the game industry.
Cloud Gaming was introduced to the world with OnLive in June 2010 and, despite a fair amount of skepticism, the entrant competitor has proven to be a force to be dealt with, receiving attention from a still greater sum of investors. The idea of the Cloud is a major buzzword today, being wildly attractive and in everyone’s interest, but the fact that most cloud solutions mainly revolves around data storage and certain server-side calculations, OnLive has taken a major step forward in the true Cloud-isation of at least gaming.
Technologically, the feat is nothing short of incredible. The main concept is incredibly simple, but still seems sci-fi to most of us. The fact that the client computer just sends input – keystrokes, mouse movements, touch and so forth – to a powerhouse server park and receives pure audio/visual data to display may not seem like a big deal, but when it all happens at around thirty frames per second, processing complex graphics and artificial intelligence, and sends it all back and forth within seconds, its breathtaking.
I first had my go with OnLive last fall , when I suddenly found out that it wasn’t region-locked anymore. While I expected fairly heavy lag as a result of US-only server farms, I was pleasantly surprised. Extreme speed games like Unreal Tournament 3 and general mouse behavior felt a little too off to truly enjoy, but keyboard-controlled games played like a breeze, and I quickly became occupied with defending my cores in Defense Grid Gold. It ran perfectly smooth.
Most people today seem to ignore Cloud Gaming as nothing more than a niche, as they believe that the lag time, no matter how small it may be in reality, will still sufficiently annoying to allow for a switch between local processing to cloud processing, at least in regards to games. But in my eyes, the technological leap that has been made within the last year proves that, while services like OnLive might initially appeal to certain niche markets and demographics, it will over time come to be the preferred way. Simply because it already offers features that far outshines local processing – such as high and frequent hardware costs – and over time will reach satisfactory performance in every aspect for 99% of the gamers out there.
It follows perfectly in the footsteps of Clayton Christensen’s model for disruptive innovations, initially delivering worse performance in some regards, but will be appealing to certain niches that have suffered from performance oversupply. If we think of the amount of netbooks and low-spec computers that populate both less tech savvy people in the western world and most of the developing countries, demanding games are simply not an option. OnLive services as a perfect service for those that want to move past light, browser-based games and into rich and compelling 3D universes.
While the future for Cloud Gaming may be fuzzy – will OnLive become the dominant player, who else will enter the competition, what are the optimal business models, et cetera – I cannot but see it as the future. For some players, for some genres, for some game experiences, client processing may always be the only solution, but for the mainstream, the majority of consumers that shape the development of any industry, Cloud Gaming will become the de facto standard as I see it. But it is a future that takes a strong amount of confidence to see… and I for one am excited to see, which of the current dominant competitors in the industry are brave and open-minded enough to see it in due time.