Is cloud gaming the future of the cloud?

20.02.2020 1,302 5

Martin Deshev

People use cloud services all the time these days and they mostly don’t even realize that. However, these same services actually have quite the big impact on cloud computing in general. The same can be said about cloud gaming which is about to have a very big year.

Cloud gaming shapes up to be quite promising. It’s going to allow people to seamlessly play their favorite games everywhere on every device. This means they would be able to start gaming on their phone, then pick up from the same spot on their TV or PC and so on. All they would need is a decent internet connection. No more need for paying big money for consoles or even more expensive gaming PCs. And all that would be possible thanks to the cloud that will be powering these types of services.

Shaping the future

While there’s still a lot to know and expect from cloud gaming coming to the market, the technology itself is quite ready. Now is the time to scale it and make sure it will work out as planned. This is exactly what the big companies, which are planning such services, are doing right now. Unsurprisingly, two of them also have big cloud computing businesses – Google and Microsoft. The Redmont-based company even has an Azure service for building “global gaming experiences”. It’s used mostly for multiplayer gaming, but it’s still a big part of the overall cloud gaming experience.

So, it may seem weird, but video games are indeed one of the main drivers in cloud development. That’s because they are a very complex challenge, requiring substantial investments in data centers, infrastructure, bandwidth, etc. While most cloud services are very focused and need only a few specific features, cloud gaming needs the best of everything.

Be it storage for the bigger and bigger games, powerful hardware to deliver Full HD and even 4K video graphics, fast connections for little to no latency and so much more. Even security is important, especially in the days where games are mostly free to play, but you pay a lot for in-game purchases which involves personal and financial data. Not to mention that all of this requires a lot of cooling and of course energy.

Big moves

There are great expectations for cloud gaming. If they are met, these types of services will be quite massive and can bring gaming as a whole on a new level. Mobile games are already making more money than PC games. Imagine when you can play AAA (the Hollywood equivalent of big budget block buster movies) games from a PC on your phone. This will make gaming accessible to anyone with a decent enough connection.

In turn, this will put a lot more strain on the networks which will have to stream massive amounts of various data to millions of players at the same time. And all of that will have to happen as everything else continues to evolve, too. This means even bigger video streaming, more mobile apps, storage, Big Data, AI, IoT and so on. As a result, data centers will have to adapt to these massive changes very, very quickly. And if cloud gaming takes off as fast as expected, it will be the driving force behind making data centers ready for the future.