What is Cloud Gaming and the buzz around it?
Remember the old times when we had to run a whole errand just to be able to play our favorite games like Super Mario, Road Rash ( them combats tho!), Need for Speed, Call of duty, and Age of empire? Shed crocodile tears in front of our parents, check. buy a console, check. buy the setup, check. Today we don’t need to go through all that tussle, all thanks to Cloud Gaming also known as game as a service.
Cloud Computing:
What is Cloud?
For starters, a cloud is basically- a technology that gives you access to some resources for your users while keeping the actual main infrastructure completely abstract (hidden)or in a faraway place, isn’t that what an actual cloud we see in the sky, is all about? we share our sky with others, and so is the case with this technology as well. The resources could be a simple server, networking, software, analytics, or intelligence.
“Cloud computing is like giving your IT department thermostats that they can turn on, up, down, or off based on their needs. Need extra processing power to cover your peak period? Crank it up — and then turn it down when you’re finished.”- Awesome Cloud
This means you don’t have to run around settling deals or deciding which resources (networking, server, database, etc) to buy and from where? their security, and maintenance costs. You can just go and rent these services directly from the cloud service providers(google, amazon, etc). They do all the maintenance, data storage, and security checks for you.
Cloud Gaming
I know you’re wondering what is cloud gaming then? well, on very similar lines you can now play(stream) games using remote servers, and data centers. No more errands to run through, you can just take your device out and start playing anywhere. This concept is very similar to the streaming platforms we have today, for example, Spotify. You ‘stream ‘ music on Spotify and the content is present on the cloud servers of Spotify to which you get access when you log in to your account, similarly, there are cloud gaming platforms like Google Stadia, Playstation Now, NVIDIA GeForce, Amazon Luna.
“Enabling people to play the games they want, on the device they want, wherever they want. Just like you listen to any music you want, in whatever situation you are, I believe in a future where gaming is the same.”-
How does cloud gaming works:
Issues with cloud gaming:
Like any technology we have some setbacks here as well, prominent ones could be
- Sole dependency on the internet connection: If you are not connected to a good internet connection, you won’t be able to access any of the resources hosted on the cloud.
- Security threats, although many solutions are available now and security has been improving gradually, it is a pitfall one should be aware of before diving.
- latency: In internet-based services like the cloud, it’s all about the real-time quality of an interaction i.e the total time taken between the sending of the request(from your side) and the response given back by the cloud server. latency is the delay between a client request and a cloud service provider’s response.
One can check for latency in a gaming server through a ping command. There’s a saying in the online gaming community
” Cloud gaming don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got a ping”.
Now, what is a ping? and, why does it matter? In a nutshell, it’s an internet program(code) that lets you test if the machine(or a server in this case)with which you’re establishing a connection exists and can hear your request calls(complicated, I know right!) whenever someone uses this piece of code it returns a value, the larger this value is the higher are the chances that you’re gonna lose in the game, no matter how good you are!
4 . Complex user experience :
Streaming on Spotify is one thing, but having to both stream the game and relay your gamepad input requires speeds that simply weren’t available just a few short years ago Network bandwidth is one obstacle to reaching this speed, How? In the process of sending commands( user giving input through interactive interface elements)and obtaining video and audio streams viewed once and then discarded, users, need to connect to potentially distant servers. This results in uneven latency across the gaming ecosystem providing a suboptimal experience for players, and let’s be honest no one likes a lackluster gaming experience. When it comes to this industry the gaming experience can make or break the deal, optimizing servers seems to be the only way out.
No one is perfect, that’s a given in the field of technology where the competition is cutthroat one has to keep improving the current solutions to be the most relevant technology in the market. Cloud gaming definitely has its pros and cons, these are supposed to be discussed in detail because then only the cons can be minimized and the pros could be maximized.
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