Cloud-Based Gaming Overcomes Challenges In Online Gaming

 

Cloud-based gaming is simply an online gaming service that leverages cloud technology. There are a rapid evolution and adoption of cloud computing across multiple industries. Gradually, cloud computing is getting implemented in the online gaming industry as well. The finest example of cloud gaming service is the evolution of Pokémon Go on the Google Cloud Platform.

The increasing popularity of live streaming is now being embraced in the online gaming sector as well as the launch of streaming cloud gaming.

What is streaming cloud gaming?

It is the live streaming of online games on a personal computer, smartphone, or other devices without downloading and installing the complete game. A big advantage of this streaming game is that online gamers are not bound to a single device, rather can play (or resume) their online games on any device.

3 Types of Streaming Technology

Streaming of cloud gaming is mainly divided into three streaming technologies.

1. Video streaming –In video streaming, the gamers send input commands to the server, and the server processes the user commands and runs the game. In this type of streaming, image rendering happens in the cloud on remote CPUs/GPUs, while the videos in the online games are transmitted to the gamers and decoded on the local gaming device. Video streaming assists gamers to play online games at high settings with good graphics. But, it needs a fast and stable Internet.

2. Command streaming –In this command based streaming, game logic and graphic commands are processed in the cloud, while rendering happens on the gamer’s local gaming device. As compared to video streaming, this technique minimizes the load on the network. In order to send commands, gamers need significantly less bandwidth from the Internet than transmitting a video. Apart from that, it also allows gamers to minimize latency because gamers do not need to encode and decode a video. But the issue with this streaming technique is that there is a limitation in-game graphics due to the GPU capabilities of the gaming device.

3. File streaming –This file streaming is also called stream file transfer. The technique allows online gamers to use an online game after downloading some files (say 5-10 %) to their gaming device. The file streaming technique assists game developers to minimize the cost of generating media and transmitting patches to online gamers. As gamers are required to download files to their gaming device, so they require to have high-end equipment.

With streaming services, lots of online games are processed in a data center outside the gamers’ environment. A data center means that there are several racks of consoles or servers to provide the entire gaming experience to the gamers via the internet. Data centers can process game logic, images, graphics, AI, and lots of others.

The major aspects of cloud-based gaming are managing virtual gaming, game-data processing, and game-content generation.

1. Virtual-World Management: The cloud-based gaming platform should be scalable to offer online gaming services to millions of players, be consistent in serving services, and low latency.

2. Game-Data Processing: The tons of players in the virtual world generates huge amounts of data such as user interaction, players’ move, user traffic, and lots more. Analyzing and getting insights on these data can assist game developers to know better about the player’s behavior and to gain insights into system operation. Thus allowing you to create better user-centric games for the players. Cloud-enabled data processing could offer an efficient platform for time-based and graph analytics.

3. Game-Content Generation: Game content is the crux of the entertainment value of online games. A cloud-based gaming platform offers elastic, cost-effective, and procedural content generation for games to provide a premium gaming experience to gamers.

Wrapping Up

Streaming games over the cloud is quite similar to streaming videos via YouTube, Netflix, and other platforms. A fruitful cloud game should not experience any latency issues or lags rather the cloud games should have quick reactions and output to gamer controls. During the early times, this was a bottleneck with lots of cloud games, but currently, such challenges are a thing of the past. 

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