What is Cloud Gaming Services and How Does It Work?

Cloud gaming is among a discreetly discussed topic before a decade among SEOs of some giant companies like Sony, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, Amazon, Walmart, Nintendo, etc, but now it’s becoming more than that in the public domain. Well, services like Google Stadia, GeForce Now and some others are available in the mainstream market and many others are already in the race and they are cooking something behind closed doors. With the rise of cloud gaming services, it may have big changes in the gaming industry similar to tv streaming services in the coming future.

Cloud gaming services or game streaming

The general perception in the world of video gaming is, you just insert a disc into your game console or download a game’s files onto a drive. But, the processor inside your box would be the cause of the look and speed of the game, the game only looks as good and only runs as fast as the processor inside your gaming system. You can’t do anything to upgrade your gaming experience with your older version of pc or expired console “box”.

With cloud gaming, that “box” lives in a data center full of servers, miles and miles away. You stream games, just like you’d stream a YouTube or Netflix video, as a series of compressed video frames — only now, those videos are reacting to your inputs. Every time you press a button for your character to jump, that input gets sent to a remote server, tells the game what you’ve done, and sends you a new video frame that shows you the result. Multiply by 30 or 60 frames per second, and you’ve got a video.

Here, cloud gaming enters and the future where discs, and downloads, even consoles are no longer required because with the gaming on demand regime you’ll stream games across the internet as easily as you stream your favorite Netflix show.

In popular culture, it is known as game streaming, or as the game on-demand, cloud gaming refers to using cloud servers, rather than local devices, to run games. Essentially, the goal is to make high-end gaming experiences simpler and cheaper to access and this time, it seems like things all are conceived finally to bring cloud gaming to the world.

It’s important to note that although cloud gaming often allows you to play the same AAA games as other platforms, it differs from traditional consoles and PCs in very significant ways. So what is cloud gaming and how does it work? Let’s break it down.

The core idea behind game streaming on cloud

When you play videogames, most of the time, you make use of a specific video game device. A PC, a smartphone, a game console, a handheld, all of these devices are essentially computers that run your game as software. It operates essentially the same way every video game back to the experimental 1970s prototypes did. You give it some input, it processes that input, and it returns the results of that input to the screen. From Spacewar! to God of War, all video games are the same.

Of course, this system has limitations. A game device can only ever play games compatible with its hardware. You won’t see an NES playing God of War, it’s just not powerful enough. This might seem painfully obvious, but it’s these exact limitations that have kept many casual fans out of the PC gaming world. The idea of building a PC with specific specs in order to run specific games is just too intimidating.

Cloud gaming services was an idea that was supposed to remove these limitations by utilizing the internet and streaming video. The idea was simple, offload all the processing. Instead of having a device that was essentially a computer running a game, you could instead have a device that was a glorified terminal. Instead of running the game, all your terminal would have to do is show the game to the player. All the processing, graphics rendering, and input processing are done by the game running on a high-powered server computer. The only thing your terminal has to do is display the graphics feed as streaming video.

There are two major advantages to the cloud gaming approach. The first is that users don’t have to buy new hardware every few years in order to run the latest and greatest games. The other is that it theoretically allows users to play any game on any device with a screen and an internet connection.

With even next-gen consoles lined-up to offer game streaming support, this is certainly where the industry is headed.

History of Cloud Gaming Service

The very first cloud gaming demonstration happened in the year 2000 at E3. It was a small demonstration by G-cluster which streamed PC games to handheld devices over Wi-Fi and even though the streaming computer and screen were both local to each other, it still introduced quite a bit of input latency to the formula.

The original offering was cloud gaming services over Wi-Fi to handheld devices. Video game developer Crytek began the research on a cloud gaming system in 2005 for Crysis but halted development in 2007 to wait until the infrastructure and cable Internet providers were able to complete the task.

Later, in March 2010 OnLive became one of the first publicly accessible remote cloud gaming services and it had a mixed reception at best. Few were willing to put money into its micro-console and most games were still plagued with heavy latency. In 2015, Sony acquired OnLive and converted this technology, along with the technology of another cloud service, Gaikai, to create PlayStation Now.

How does it work?

Many people stream their movies these days, rather than buying DVDs or Blu-ray discs — heck, most computers (and some game consoles) don’t even come with disc drives anymore. Game streaming works similarly, at least in principle.

Rather than owning the hardware necessary to run high-end (or really any) video games like a gaming PC or console, game streaming lets users offload the processing demands to a company’s server. Basically, when you start running a game using a cloud gaming service, rather than sticking a disc in your box at home or booting up an app you have installed, a server acts as a high-powered PC somewhere and does that for you, streaming a feed of the game from tens or hundreds of miles away.

Take Google Stadia, which uses proprietary tech based on Linux. When you log into the service and pick a game to play, a super-powerful server at one of the company’s data centers starts running it. The server then sends a feed of that game running from the data center to your home where you can interact with it via the Chrome browser, a supported phone or Chrome OS tablet, or a Chromecast Ultra.

Using a controller or mouse and keyboard, the service logs your inputs and sends them back to the server, which then carries them out and streams the result back to you. This process does add some input lag, but with the right home network conditions, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a local gaming machine.

Other cloud gaming services work very similarly. Playstation Now obviously bases its tech on PlayStation 4 architecture, and Microsoft’s xCloud uses Xbox hardware in the cloud. Other options like Shadow, GeForce Now, and Vortex use PC hardware, and support gamepads as well as mouse-and-keyboard configurations. Check here the best web hosting service in your country with Hosting Foundry that can help you with your gaming website as well.

Regardless of the input method, the principle remains the same. The services run a game on a server, log your inputs remotely, and stream back the result. Of course, getting this to work and remain playable is incredibly complicated. Internet speeds have only recently increased to the point where this kind of service could be widely accessible, and there are still plenty of connection and compatibility limitations.

Most services support PC, Mac, and Android devices, with iOS development lagging a big behind. Results on Wi-Fi will vary depending on your router and connection, but wired connections offer the best experience on all services. For now, playing on LTE offers mixed results for the few services that offer it, but the rise of 5G may turn the tables for mobile game streaming with ultra-low latency, high bandwidth connections.

The Problems With Cloud Gaming

You see, the promise of cloud gaming is allowing a server to do all the heavy work for you while all you have is a screen and an internet connection. This still means you have to send all your button inputs over the internet to the server, and then after the server processes those inputs it has to resend the game’s video feedback to you. That takes time because unfortunately, the internet has limits.

We have previously written about how even a perfect internet connection running at the actual speed of light will introduce a couple of frames of lag when connecting up to a server half a world away. You can’t break the speed of light, so our internet connections will literally never get any better than this.

So the only way a cloud gaming service can reliably send near lagless gameplay to homes all over the world is to have server farms all over the world, local to all gamers using the service. In addition, these gamers will have to use an extremely fast internet connection and these server farms have to utilize the same high-speed connection for uploading video feeds. All of this amounts to money, a lot of money, spend on both ends by both the consumer and the gamer.

And if the idea was to make cloud gaming easier by reducing anxiety over specs, it doesn’t really accomplish that if you have to have some sort of minimum internet speed to take advantage of it. That’s just a different sort of spec and it causes the same amount of anxiety in casual gamers.

Another grey area within the cloud gaming

While the idea of a gaming future with no consoles, no pcs, nothing but screens and internet connections is somewhat alluring, cloud gaming has a lot of dangers associated with it. The most notable danger is historical preservation.

Right now, we are having a very hard time historically preserving gameplay experiences. Any game with an online component cannot be preserved in a meaningful way. Retro games, while emulatable, are constantly under fire from companies like Nintendo making emulators and ROMs less accessible.

Many have pointed toward cloud gaming as a major bonus for gaming historians. Thousands upon thousands of retro games can be emulated from a remote server and played without needing to unearth hardware that can be up to three decades old.