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Paul Kamma used to lead an uncomplicated life. As a video games enthusiast, he'd while away his time playing first-person shooters and other high-octane games.
Then he got married and started a family.
"When you come home, you play with your kids… You don't have much time to play big games like GTA [Grand Theft Auto]," he says.
"But I still wanted to do this because I loved it."
As well as not being able to spend as long at his computer as he once did, Mr Kamma also didn't have free reign over the household TV like before.
So, he turned to cloud gaming, which allowed him to stream video games to a simple laptop computer. Anywhere he went, he could still have access to his favourite games.
Mr Kamma lives in Germany. The streaming service he chose, Shadow, allowed him to set up a remote PC on a server somewhere in The Netherlands.
He could install games on the server and connect to it via his computer, which displayed the game screen and allowed him to control his character.
"I can play it everywhere, I can play it at work if I have free time there," he says.
That's what cloud gaming is - your game runs on a powerful computer somewhere else and you just connect to it.
It means players can access big, processor-hungry games on simple devices - cheap tablet computers, even.
While such a set-up has been possible for some time, cloud gaming will soon be available from Google, and Microsoft as well.
This month Google will launch its Stadia service in the US, UK, Europe and Canada, and Microsoft has just begun previewing its Project xCloud.
[...Games industry analyst Piers] Harding-Rolls points out that cloud gaming of this type has already been attempted, 10 years ago, with a service called OnLive.
It was reasonably successful, perhaps even ahead of its time, but it went the way of the dodo. Partly because back then internet infrastructure was not as robust as it is today, and connection speeds were slower.
"It cost them too much to stream the content, and that left them with very little room to manoeuvre in terms of acquiring content," says Mr Harding-Rolls.
And that content, is make or break.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:03AM
Lots of games don't actually need to be very responsive. Pokémon, any JRPG, some Western RPGs, walking simulators like Detroit: Become Human (why aren't these called "mystlikes"), anything that's turn-based, slow paced builders and simulators like Sims or Minecraft.
Lots of games do need to be very responsive. FPSs, sports or driving games, fighting games, RTS and MOBAs, RPGs with lots of action content like Dark Souls.
The former will work fine, the latter will work poorly. But people have a way of rebelling against "sure, it's crap, but it's all you need, right?" PC Jr, Windows RT, whatever, nobody wants stuff that's just plain worse.
Game developers aren't going to like this either. Free to play developers won't care of course, and really competitive games won't work on streaming services anyway, but there are a bunch of games - mostly in the RPG category - where you pay full price, but once it's over, it's over. You could go play it again, but you usually don't. Developers can't license these for streaming because they would lose money, as most users would just play for a month or so. You'd basically have to pay nearly full price to unlock the game, because monthly residual payments wouldn't cover the development expenses.
There's also the hardware situation. Netflix has to pay a lot for content, but they don't really need a lot of server power per user. Streaming games will need a powerful server, and that has to be paid for. Unlike most web services, which might need a lot of server power for a moment while it figures out your directions or runs your web search but then can handle someone else's requests on the same server immediately afterward, games tie up the server completely, the whole time you're using it. This is going to be very expensive for the operator.
Some things just aren't suited to the cloud. Games are one of those things.