Cloud’s the limit: The race for the future of gaming

Recently, Netflix announced that starting from 2022, it would be offering “games” on its platform alongside its existing catalog of content. As per Bloomberg, this is meant to be similar in approach to what they did with documentaries and comedy specials.

The company later clarified that “cloud gaming” will not be the focus, to begin with at least. Though it’s not a stretch to imagine that it’s more of an eventuality.

This move comes as no surprise considering the amount of attention cloud gaming has received this past couple of years. Almost every single silicon valley juggernaut including the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia, have either launched or intuited their plans for this burgeoning new space.

But why cloud gaming and why now?

From DVDs to streaming

This isn’t Netflix’s first shift into a new medium of entertainment. Back in the mid-2000s, the company was one of the first to phase out physical DVDs and move a majority of their film catalog onto servers. Yes, internet connectivity was nowhere near as rapid or advanced as it is now. But the company still identified the potential of the medium to provide an unprecedented experience to the user. 

Around the same time, Amazon launched their Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, effectively democratizing server infrastructure. The rest, of course, is history.

In 2012, industry analysts estimated AWS earnings to surpass $1 billion. At their annual developer conference that same year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced that 100% of Netflix services would be hosted to AWS. This made it the second-biggest business to run on the platform after Amazon’s own retail division.

Meanwhile, the rest of the industry hasn’t sat languishing on the wayside either.

Two years after Amazon, Google launched their own Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft shortly thereafter. Even a quick glance at their quarterly growth is enough to grasp the absolutely massive impact this has had on their individual businesses.

In the case of Microsoft, Azure cloud services now surpass their stalwart Office product and almost doubles the revenue of Windows.

More revenue means more business, and with more business comes competition. In the cloud arena, companies duel it out in two areas; pricing and capability.

The first is very straightforward; companies try to outdo each other in terms of the pricing they offer for equivalent services. A famous instance of this would be in 2012 when Microsoft ‘pledged’ that Azure would either match or offer lower prices compared to AWS. This one-upmanship has resulted in significantly lowering the cost of accessibility across the board.

The second area however is more discrete. But significantly more important.

GGWP GPUs

Once companies realized the promise of the cloud, they quickly scrambled to provide as many services as they can from each of their offerings. One area that has seen the most significant growth in the past couple of years is Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This can be observed in the exponential increase in research publications in the domain.

If ML is known for one thing, it is its ability to solve previously unsolvable problems by detecting patterns amidst mountains of data. Although this comes at the expense of a massive appetite for hardware resources. 

A solution for this was pioneered by Nvidia in the early 2000s with general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU technology).

What they identified was that running certain computationally intensive tasks on GPUs was far more efficient and faster than running them on CPUs, even at lower clock speeds. This apparently came down to how they handled operations at a pipeline level. Thus, the era of using GPUs for scientific computing was born.

GPUs, for science!

To be fair, scientific computing did exist long before ML became part of common parlance. But it was mostly delegated to running complex simulations, often on very exclusive supercomputers by academics. 

The new resurgence in ML not only meant that hardware was being heavily invested in, but the software also became a lot more user-friendly, and accessible to many.

It didn’t take long for cloud vendors to put two and two together and start offering GPUs with their services, sometimes for free albeit with time restrictions. Some even went as far as providing their own custom products to stand out from the crowd as in the case of Google launching their Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) ASICs in 2016.

Slowly, additional features like faster storage and more RAM also began to get added to the equation. This made computation on the cloud an even more compelling prospect.

Faster than light

The performance gain in the cloud is only half of the picture. The other is reliable and fast internet connectivity.

In their 2020 report, the ITU noted that on average approximately 84% of the globe is covered with 4G connectivity. With up to 100Mbps in real-world download speeds, this was a massive 20 times jump over its predecessor. These numbers meant 4G unlocked a new level of content consumption such as 4K streaming.

Its successor; 5G, promises to be faster still with up to 10Gbps+ download speeds in lab-controlled experiments. While the adoption of this wireless technology is still in its nascent stages, others like fiber broadband are also proving to be extremely capable and even more reliable.

This combined with the consistent increase in the number of data centers globally, which as per Synergy Research has grown year on year, the power of the cloud is no longer oceans away.

All of this leads us back to the original conundrum… why cloud gaming and why now?

The Perfect Storm

Cloud gaming isn’t a concept that’s totally new. Developers have been dabbling with utilizing the near-infinite horsepower of remote infrastructure for years. The most notable example of late is Microsoft Flight Simulator.

In its latest release in 2020, Microsoft and Asobo Studios were determined to provide a next-generation gaming experience with their product. 

By utilizing the former’s expertise with Bing maps, the development team sought to create a 1:1 recreation of the Earth with real-time weather and lighting effects. To pull this off they leveraged the power of Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure to generate the real-time effects and ‘overlay’ them on the player’s game. While technically the player still has to download the massive game for which the system requirements are also quite ridiculous, it’s a glimpse into a future where perhaps the entire game itself can be run on the cloud.

There a several reasons for doing so.

1. Increasing game sizes

The amount of storage required by a standard triple-A title has gone up exorbitantly over the years. As per Seagate, a typical game in an 8th generation console can take up 35 – 50 GB. The most recent 9th generation stretches that to even 100GB+ in games like Call of Duty Warzone. This is not even considering the additional ‘patches’ and Downloadable Content (DLCs) released by studios after the initial launch of the game. 

In some cases, these exceed the size of the initial game itself and often consist of superfluous content that could directly impact gameplay.

In the cloud, there will be no ‘installations’ as everything is streamed in real-time. There also won’t be patch downloads as all of it will be handled on the backend without any intervention from the user. 

It would be as seamless as noticing a new title in your Netflix catalog which was added overnight.

Studios also need not be bothered about optimizing games for different platforms or console generations. It’s the ultimate one size fits all model where they write the game for the cloud, but it runs everywhere!

2. More demanding hardware

Every console generation promises a new experience for gamers. 

With the 8th generation, it was 4K gaming and with the current generation, it’s ray-tracing. As usual with each new generation, an older series of consoles are left behind.

With the cloud, hardware obsolescence will be rendered, well, obsolete as players won’t need to own any gaming hardware, to begin with. As long as one has a reliable and fast internet connection they are good to go.

This means that the cloud will also make gaming accessible to a wider audience. Gone will be days where one coughs up massive amounts of cash for every new console generation or for PC upgrades. Instead, a simple monthly subscription will take its place.

3. More expansive environments

Games have typically been limited by the capabilities of the hardware they run on.

Companies often touted this as a selling point to get more units off shelves with each new iteration. It could be the leap from 32 bit to 64 bit resulting in 3D environments, or cartridges to optical disks resulting in more detailed, feature-rich game worlds. The situation was almost always marketed as a quantum leap in technology and associated player experience.

All of these leaps that have come before pales in comparison to what the cloud could do.

Studios will no longer be limited by the hardware specifications of yesteryear, nor would they need to be worried. With the near-infinite scaling power of the cloud, powered by the sheer grunt of server hardware, ideas that were previously fantasy are now very much within reach.

Take the case of Cloud Imperium’s, “Star Citizen”. It’s an MMORPG that aims to simulate an entire universe with NPCs that have desires, skills, and jobs running a dynamic economy. The game would also include a novel persistent world space that retains object locations even after a player logs out, all by leveraging the power of the cloud. While the game itself, similar to MS Flight Simulator needs to be downloaded and installed, it’s very much an online-only game that can quite possibly be run exclusively on the cloud in the future.

4. A solution to piracy

Piracy in video games is one of the industry’s biggest problems.  In 2014 it was reported that an estimated $74 billion was lost due to it with equivalent amounts in damages being incurred year on year.

Measures to combat the practice such as DRM have not been as effective either. The main reason for piracy is the manner in which games are played.

As long as ‘downloading and installing’ remains a foundational component of the industry, nefarious parties can meddle with the code, package it and distribute it as needed.

This all falls apart the moment that foundation is removed. With cloud gaming, it is now possible.

The race for cloud gaming

Different companies have different perspectives and opinions on the future of gaming. Some believe it’s in portables, others believe it’s in consoles, and there are more who believe it’s in PCs.

Amidst all of this, cloud gaming still retains its merit as a viable solution to many woes of the industry, for both studios and players alike. Looking at what companies are doing with the technology and where the gaming industry is headed, there’s nowhere to go, but up.

Though as a Sri Lankan gaming enthusiast and one who’s deeply invested in the trajectory of cloud gaming, it’s often disheartening and disappointing when you introspect on the state of our own local ISPs. From pseudo-unlimited packages, unreliable connectivity, and ridiculous temporal quota limitations, the user experience is a mess, to say the least.

However, all is not lost. In 2016, after much anticipation, Netflix finally launched in Sri Lanka. Years later, Spotify also came into the picture. These were followed up with generous packages from ISPs that allowed people to stream unlimited content at a fixed monthly rate.

Will cloud gaming also garner the same amount of enthusiasm from our service providers? Only time will tell. Until then, however, the race for the cloud goes on.