By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
SvennoJ on 23 July 2014
Edit Thread
soulfly666 said:

Firstly, just to throw it out there, cloud computing is in no way whatsoever new technology, just FYI for those who don't know. It has been used extensively for 7-10 years by large software and services companies, and the concept was invented decades before that.

Secondly, here is where I stand on it in terms of gaming. The benefits it could achieve are staggering such as - No new hardware. No complicated setup. No game discs. No digital downloads. No game installations. No game patches, latency improvement, unified device gaming capability instead of "exclusives" forcing purchasing decisions and on and on.

My honest opinion, it won't work. Overutilization would crush its stability if it was depended on globally. Clustering, maintenance, monitoring, virtualization, storage, patching, and everything else that goes with maintaining a dedicated gaming cloud infrastructure will be EXPENSIVE. There is no way those costs won't be forced down to end users who mostly already don't agree with the premise of full cloud reliability. These demands would greatly increase and demand powerful local hardware when 4K is the new standard which, IMO is not that far away. Take a look at OnLive. It is a good idea of what we would be able to expect from dedicated cloud gaming - lower resolution and reliability issues rampant.

How do you reckon it can improve latency? For multiplayer online games?
The extra lag caused by transmission and (de)compression would make VR impossible via the cloud, unless there is some local processing to process head movements with the lowest possible latency.

It will work, a bit of extra latency and playing at 720p on medium/low settings is acceptable for plenty of people when the price is right. Hopefully that will still be too expensive as AAA exclusives will otherwise suffer like physical movie sales are declining due to readily available cheap streaming quality. High end pcs don't get the focus since the bulk of sales comes from consoles. If the revenue shifts to game streaming then consoles will also no longer be the lead platform. Getting the game to run 'cheap' will become the focus.