The future of cloud gaming is one of the most uncertain things in the gaming sector – from the initial hype from 2012-2014 to the cooling down and flopping in the two years afterward, and, finally, picking back up and gradually getting a higher market share in recent years. What did cause this fluctuation? Will cloud gaming finally fulfill the potential people thought it had in 2012? How long do we have to wait?
The Initial Hype
The initial hype was due to two things coinciding together and making people very optimistic about the technology:
1. For the first time, a segment of the customers had internet connections fast enough and responsive enough that it would be feasible to stream video games in real-time. It would’ve been unimaginable, just 10 years ago, to send the player input to some faraway computing center and receive the executed code back and stream it to your computer. But, by 2012, some people’s internet was fast enough to do that, and some companies wanted to exploit that opening.
2. Microsoft introducing the new Xbox console and making the cloud a centerpiece of its selling points. While, with the benefit of hindsight, most of us know that Microsoft’s decision was a mistake, and cloud didn’t provide all the things that were promised, nevertheless, it was a huge deal at the time. It had a marked effect on the attitude of journalists and the wider market. A lot of people started focusing on the cloud, the term entered the normal gaming vernacular, and people were thinking about buying the console specifically for this.
These two points explain the initial hype behind the cloud – of course, it didn’t pan out like Microsoft was expecting, and there are reasons for this.
What Cause it to Fail?
First, it should be clear that there are some genuine reasons why the cloud is likely to be the future:
The economies of scale: it is a well-known fact of economics that when you produce larger machines that are capable of better output, the overall cost per unit of production falls off. For tech, this means that large scale CPU and GPU deployment could give you computation power at a much cheaper rate than a home-owned high-quality AMD card. When the tech matures, you’d expect to get computing power at much cheaper prices than you’d normally do if you outright bought hardware. This is the same reason why most people opt to just host their websites on cloud platforms instead of buying server hardware.
This also plays into the “sharing economy” in some ways. When you connect users through the internet to some supercomputer, you’ll be able to ration out the computing power by demand. As no one uses their computers 24/7 and plays on it, when you’re not using the computing power, someone else might be able to use it. In the end, this is a much more effective and cheaper way of using resources.
So, why did it fail? It seems it had a lot of things going on for it:
The increase in bandwidth wasn’t worth it: to stream games, especially at higher resolutions, you need an insane bandwidth capable of downloading gigs of data in a minute. This not only means you need a faster internet plan, but you’ll have to pay a lot for it.
The industry is nascent, and like almost all nascent industries, the initial adopters have to bear a lot of costs, sometimes at a loss. The tech simply wasn’t ready for mainstream use, and Microsoft advertizing for it as if it was ready was a giant mistake – it made the normal consumer much more pessimistic about the prospects of cloud gaming.
These things are turning around now, and the stigma around it is disappearing – maybe, Microsoft was right all along, but it was just a bit early.
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