Cloud gaming holds much promise and is attractive to gamers who want convenience, low cost, access to a large library of games, and the ability to play on any device.
However, cloud gaming faces significant challenges, the most important being latency, which many gamers see as a deal-breaker.
The best way to reduce latency is to reduce the distance between your game servers and your players. This means building a massive, distributed network of multi-location data centers providing computing capacity (including powerful GPUs) as close as possible to the edge.
The massive multi-cloud, multi-location networks required for low-latency cloud gaming are hard to manage. Visibility, security, and control are often fragmented. Cloud gaming can hit a wall where the burden of managing an ever-larger network makes it unprofitable to expand into new territories and access new audiences.
A modern, centralized app services platform can unify your management of load balancing and security in sprawling and complex edge networks, enabling you to expand without constraints, push your powerful game server technology to new frontiers, and provide low-latency cloud gaming to everyone.
Traditionally, gamers have purchased games as standalone software applications, on physical media such as disks, or via download and licensed for use on their PCs or game consoles. The games are installed and/or executed locally, with the player’s device processing all the control inputs, game logic, assets, graphic rendering, and audio-visual output.
Cloud gaming refers to a radically different distribution model in which games are hosted, processed, and rendered centrally. Instead of installing and executing a game on their local device, players have it streamed to them over the Internet.
When playing a game streamed from a cloud gaming provider:
This model allows players to access a vast library of games and launch them instantly without requiring any traditional gaming hardware, such as a PC or game console, to process and render a game in their own homes. Freed from hardware constraints, players can access cloud gaming offerings via devices that might not be able to execute high-end games natively, such as laptops, smartphones, or tablets.
The big cloud providers are not the first to try to make a successful business of cloud gaming. OnLive tried and failed all the way back in 2012; PlayStation Now has struggled for years to find an audience, and NVidia GeForce Now has been forced by publishers to withdraw a selection of games from its catalog.
Cloud gaming is not easy. Here are some of the main commercial challenges:
As you can imagine, delivering cloud gaming services is a demanding and technically complex feat. The growth of cloud gaming has placed more stress on IT infrastructure and application delivery processes. If cloud gaming replaces the majority of traditional gaming, it will require an increase in cloud computing capacity and bandwidth that will rival the global rise of streaming video.
In this section, we discuss some of the unique technical challenges of cloud gaming platforms.
To learn more about the technical challenges of cloud gaming and how to solve them, download the white paper.