Author | Josh Hendrickson
Translated by | Sambodhi
Planning | Luo Yanshan
I've been playing video games for some years. I remember my parents buying me a NES, Super Mario, and playing Radar Rat Race on my dad's Commodore 64 computer. But more than 30 years later, I feel that consoles have become irrelevant. The future will be cloud gaming, and it's Xbox that makes me believe in that.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think consoles are going to disappear completely, and I don't think the current trend is the end of the Xbox and PlayStation battle. However, I think cloud gaming will hopefully change the landscape of "console wars," as we can see from Nintendo's Switch. Ultimately, the game world with cloud gaming at its core is the future we should all embrace, and it will make the development of video games even better.
What is cloud gaming?
Before discussing why I think cloud gaming is the future trend, let's start by discussing what cloud gaming is. In the history of modern video games, they have worked much the same way. In front of you is a machine with controls, screens, and internal hardware that contains everything you need to run the game, including the game itself.
At first, playing video games required large machines, but now we usually call such machines "arcade machines": wooden casings with a TV, joystick or turntable, buttons, and a weak computer that is difficult to complete basic tasks. But that's enough to get the video games Pong and Pac-Man to come to us, and that's what matters most. With the advent of home consoles, things began to change.
The original Atari and Nintendo game systems had many similarities with modern consoles. It's not a large, bulky all-in-one with a TV and limited content (or even just one game), but a much smaller box: no monitor and no games that can actually be played. All you need to do is have a TV and buy a separate game.
For better or worse, this is true of most games these days. In addition to portable game consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, users generally need to bring their own TV sets and then buy the games they want to play, but what kind of games you can play depends on the performance of the game console you have.
The Nintendo Switch can't play large AAA games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Star Wars: Squadrons. Because it does not have such performance, nor does it have such hard disk space. No matter how powerful the PS4 and Xbox One are, they will end up facing the same situation. And that's what cloud gaming does. Cloud gaming doesn't require hardware in your home, but instead moves to another location: the cloud.
With cloud gaming, you can access a server and connect to a dedicated computer (or a dedicated Xbox if microsoft is a) and you've completed all the steps to run the game. You don't need discs for games, you don't need powerful hardware, or even a console at all. While you can use a game console, you can also use a smartphone or streaming stick. Cloud gaming is like Netflix to DVD players to traditional games. It removes hardware and even software (DVDs). Instead, you can stream all of this to your monitor.
Just as you don't have to spend money on expensive Blu-ray players to watch a high-quality movie, one day cloud gaming can reduce (or even eliminate) the need to buy expensive consoles and gaming PCs to experience the latest and greatest games. We have seen this happen, although there will be some setbacks in the development process.
Disadvantages of cloud gaming
It should be pointed out that there are also some shortcomings in the current cloud gaming. History repeats itself. When streaming services like Netflix first came out, there wasn't much streaming content. In the years before I subscribed to Netflix, I had the company mail me more DVDs than I could actually broadcast online from a TV show or movie. At the time, Netflix had more DVD collections than digital content.
The problem didn't stop there: at the time, I was very slow on the Internet. Although it is not dial-up Internet, the feeling of Internet access is very close to dial-up Internet, and the internet speed is only 10Mbps. Every time I want to play a movie online, I know I have to put up with buffering. Netflix went to great lengths to keep my network well connected, which meant reducing the quality of the video to the point where it was impossible to look at directly. Even so, the film pauses due to buffering, as if it were an interstitial advertisement.
Cloud gaming has the same problem, but its scale is much more complex. In the case of a movie, it's a one-way street: you download the movie's data and then look at it. But cloud gaming is a two-way street: you download data, yes, but you also interact in the game. With each button pressed, the tilt of the joystick must be returned to the game server before new data can be responded to and transferred. For some games, this may not have much of an impact, but for those that require low latency, such as shooters like HALO or fast-paced multiplayer like Rocket League, that delay isn't advisable.
The slower your internet speed, the worse your latency will be, and the delay will cost you a win. If your internet speed is very slow, then the game may not be playable at all. Even with a high-speed network, you may have to settle for lower resolutions and FPS (frames per second) than a powerful game console or gaming PC can provide. Tech companies are working to solve this problem, whether it's increasing the speed of the internet or adopting more innovative solutions, such as predicting your game choices before you make them. But in any case, in the foreseeable future, cloud gaming will not be as smooth as local gaming in many cases.
Why cloud gaming is the future
So, we understand what cloud gaming is and what are the drawbacks of cloud gaming. So, why do I still think cloud gaming is the future trend? Because I love cloud gaming now, and that's thanks to my Xbox. I'm a video game enthusiast, so I have a Switch, a PS4, an Xbox One X, a PS5, and an Xbox Series X. I enjoy playing Xbox the most, in part because I've subscribed to Game Pass. It's the best deal in gaming, and it gives me access to hundreds of video games without having to buy them all.
But modern games have a problem: the better their visual and sound effects, the larger the game files will be. It's common for a game to take up 80GB of hard drive space! In some cases, games take up more hard drive space. In some cases, the game can even take up 100GB to 150GB of space, before you download some optional content. Buying a game as a disc is not useful, as modern gaming opportunities speed up by downloading a copy of the game. But the disc can serve as proof of ownership.
I have very fast internet speeds (750Mbps downlink, 500Mbps uplink), but even with that speed, it takes a long time to download these big games. I can start downloading, cook dinner, and then come back and still see the progress bar on the go. And these big games quickly fill your hard drive, even if the PS5 and Xbox Series X use standard 1TB of storage. Currently, my Xbox has 10GB of hard drive space left after 37 games installed. It may sound like a lot, but 8 of those games take up 500GB of hard drive space — the rest are old Xbox 360 games. The same goes for my PlayStation, which has only 60G left after installing 10 games.
I often come across new and interesting games that I want to try out with Game Pass. Before I think about it, though, I have to decide which existing game I want to uninstall to make room on my hard drive for the new game. I don't have enough hard drive space to download anymore. It's a difficult thing to do, and I might have to go through a lot of effort to uninstall a game or games and wait an hour or more before I realize I don't like it. It may be prohibitive, but the Xbox Game Pass cloud streaming feature avoids all of this.
If you subscribe to Game Pass, Xbox offers more than 100 games under its Cloud Games banner. If I find a game that I think might like; I won't download and install it. Instead, I "concatenated" it to my Xbox. With streaming, I don't have to wait for long download times, I don't have to uninstall anything to make room for new games, and I don't have to worry about putting in effort into a game I might not like. Now all I have to do is immediately throw myself into the game.
Current cloud games, even if I have a fast internet speed, I haven't experienced a good experience with downloaded copies of the game. I still have to deal with some buffering issues, and some games have latency that is really an issue. However, for most "cloud ready" games, it's good enough to play. I'll play the "cloud ready" game for hours to see if I like it. If I decide I want to keep playing, I'll find a way to uninstall something and then go and download the game. Cloud gaming is the best "trial mode" in modern times.
With cloud gaming, you don't even need a console
My example has other advantages. Of course, I also have an Xbox Series X, but I don't use it very often. My son also loves video games, and this special Xbox is connected to my gaming TV. However, when I play games in the form of streaming, I usually don't get the full frame rate of the game, so I lose some of the advantages of the game TV. It doesn't matter, I can switch to my Xbox One on my big projector.
Because it's a previous generation, the Xbox One version of the game is typically scaled down from the Xbox Series X, whether it's in terms of resolution, frames per second, or screen. And the Xbox One simply can't run the game Flight Simulator. Eventually, more Xbox Series X games won't work on Xbox One. But if it's a "cloud ready" game, I get a similar experience to the Xbox Series X on Xbox One. Microsoft even announced that Flight Simulator will be added to the cloud gaming lineup so you can play the game on Xbox One.
But cloud gaming doesn't stop at Xbox: you can also play them with a low-end PC, tablet, or even a smartphone (although Apple's products can still cause you some trouble). Cloud gaming means you don't have to buy expensive hardware to play the latest and greatest games. While I'm focused on Xbox, it's not the only one on the market. You can get into the cloud gaming space through NVIDIA's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Amazon's Luna service, and even Netflix wants to jump on the bandwagon. They have pros and cons, but cloud gaming is an area where these companies will continue to invest.
By removing one of the biggest obstacles to gaming, expensive hardware, more people can benefit from it and play more games. Even the Nintendo Switch joined the bandwagon, even if the Switch wasn't performing well enough to run previous-generation high-end games like Control. But thanks to cloud gaming, you can play Control and other AAA games on the Switch.
Ultimately, cloud gaming will change the way we think about PCs and smartphones. But that's far away, and companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft could have an uphill battle over the "cloud computer wars." For now, the advantages of cloud gaming are obvious: cloud gaming can enhance the console experience of today, at least for Xbox. We will be able to see if Sony will emulate Microsoft on the PlayStation.
https://www.reviewgeek.com/111287/why-cloud-gamings-one-killer-feature-sold-me-on-the-future/