Is cloud gaming the future?

[Tinman]

The silver lining behind cloud gaming

Cloud gaming in general has received a pretty lackluster response. This is especially true in South Africa, where the entire concept seemed rather preposterous in our broadband environment. With this I’d have to agree, the general consensus from gamers was a rather mature, “lol, the internet is crap.”

For those of you possibly unfamiliar with the concept (the response has been that lackluster), cloud gaming involves playing your games on a remote server, across the internet. Essentially. the actual rendering and processing of the game is handled server-side, which means your shoddy laptop that you use to play Solitaire could run Mass Effect 2 on full graphics. The bottleneck here isn’t the capabilities of your computer, but rather of your internet connection. The problem there was that a reasonable investment in computer hardware can guarantee a flawless gaming experience, but that guarantee could not be made for your internet connection, regardless of how much you paid for it.

Read more - The silver lining behind cloud gaming

[Fast]

Maybe... but first I rate the world will have to begin using this for things like TV where our tvs have internet and stream TV shows then maybe it will move to gaming. Im quite happy with the system in place now so only time will tell

[wheunis]

Is cloud gaming the future?
Maybe.

In South Africa?
WHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!! (ie: NO!)

[DarthSWNT]

cloud computing is still a bit iffy to me. graphics processing needs to take place at your pc... it will only be when latency becomes tiny and bandwidth become huge that real cloud gaming will ever take place.

At the moment, we still need our overpowered gpus and cpus as a lot of the work has to be done at our end.

Where cloud computing work is great is in 3d rendering and the such where the job can be uploaded, processed and returned.

[Magnarmalok]

I think cloud gaming as a future has taken a massive blow with the recent sony attacks...

[playa.sa]

cloud computing is still a bit iffy to me. graphics processing needs to take place at your pc... it will only be when latency becomes tiny and bandwidth become huge that real cloud gaming will ever take place.

At the moment, we still need our overpowered gpus and cpus as a lot of the work has to be done at our end.

Totally agree, and the time it will take to actually get networks around the world upgraded with that amount of speed and capacity needed to properly handle cloud gaming..... let's just say it won't happen for a long time

[murraybiscuit]

Secondly, it means the end of console fanbois. There will be no more distinction between different consoles, as cloud gaming can be accessed from any computer, or a single, inexpensive device designed for the purpose to connect to your television. Developers would appreciate this as well, as they would no longer have to design games for multiple platforms.

there's two problems with this:

1. you assume that the same protocols, api's and dev platform will be used. hardware fragmentation may be limited, but software fragmentation will persist... and could get worse if everyone wants a piece of the cloud. due to the reduction in hardware production costs, it could make entry in to the market easier and in so doing, risk fragmentation.

2. what about peripherals? move, kinect, microphones, drum sets, controllers, webcams etc. lots of money is made off these. why would sony and ms want to reduce the hardware revenue stream or proprietary hardware? where would the benefit lie to all standardise their peripherals? how would custom input devices and port configurations work with agnostic hardware? how would io relay through the cloud?

[matt]

I'm just scared that if everything including gaming moves to cloud computing, then SA will be left even more in the dark than what it already is. The average internet connection is well below the applications threshold, and not affordable to most people anyway. Add to that the fact that most of the good stuff will require good international latency... I just can't see it working here

[Phatso]

I'm just scared that if everything including gaming moves to cloud computing, then SA will be left even more in the dark than what it already is.

Agreed and the first thing that comes to my mind when thinking of this... We just don't have the broadband infrastructure yet.

The concept itself is an awesome one, but I am sure MASSIVE teething problems will follow (Steam Cloud says hi)

[wheunis]

Agreed and the first thing that comes to my mind when thinking of this... We just don't have the broadband infrastructure yet.

The concept itself is an awesome one, but I am sure MASSIVE teething problems will follow (Steam Cloud says hi)

Steam Cloud... oy vei!
Indeed one of the more annoying things with Steam and our limited upload bandwidth in general.