Physical media and dedicated gaming consoles, we are told, are dying breeds.  And the prime suspect for their expected demise is “The Cloud”.  Cloud Gaming is on it's way and may shake up the gaming world for all of us so I'm taking a look in to this to see exactly what it is, and what it means for the gaming community.

The Cloud is already present in most of our daily lives. Every time you check your Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail emails via a web browser, you're accessing, retrieving and interacting with them stored in The Cloud. Most internet users have also interacted with The Cloud when using Google Docs in which your docs, spreadsheets and presentations are all edited online without ever being saved or used on your PC itself.  The analogy of 'The Cloud' is the 'place' where the files you view and use online are stored and means not only do we save our hard drives from the abuse of saving thousands of emails and documents, but also that we can access them anywhere on the world.

Looking at gaming, Cloud Gaming is set to cause one of the biggest shake ups of the way we play games since the early 1970's when the first dedicated gaming consoles hit the shelves.  The “Cloud Gaming” generation will not own physical media nor will they store video games on a hardrive. Instead, they'll connect via the internet to central servers, on which the games are stored and the processing required to run them takes place.  With all of the processing and media storage happening remotely, the only hardware the user will require is a PC with an internet connection and a 3rd party box to manage the flow of information from PC, through the internet to their servers, and then to receive that information back and translate it onto your TV or monitor.  With the industry leaders currently claiming to have all but eliminated latency (down to 1 millisecond), the gamer's interactions with the servers through the internet is planned to be as seamless and quick as interacting with a console in the same room.

While most of the cloud gaming services looking to enter the market are PC based rather than console based, the adaptation of consoles to the Cloud Gaming model is probably no more than 1 or 2 generations away.  The shift to Cloud based console gaming is  possible, despite hard to imagine and accept.  I can see the next generation of consoles having elements of Cloud gaming built in, running 3 delivery methods concurrently: traditional physical media, digitally distributed downloaded games and cloud based games.  You can read about digitally distributed games in an excellent article by bggriffiths.

Current Gaming

Gamer > Controller > Console/PC > Monitor/TV

Cloud Gaming

Gamer > Controller > 3rd Party Box > Internet > 3rd Party Servers > Internet > 3rd Party Box > TV/Monitor

So let's make a few distinctions with digital distribution services already available.  Cloud Gaming isn't the same as Xbox Live or the PSN.  These services offer the ability to connect to their services, download games or applications to your hard drive and access them locally from your own console.  With Cloud Gaming you don't download anything, you access and run the games, software or applications that are stored remotely on servers via the web.  The same goes for services like Metaboli, which lets you download PC games and play them from your hard drive .  Cloud Gaming means no downloading, and no hard drive; rather playing them directly from 'their' server.

If we fast-forward into the future of Cloud Gaming, how exactly will it work for Joe Gamer?  With all software and processing hardware stored remotely and accessed via the web, your end of the bargain comes in the form of a new box and a subscription to a service like OnLive or GaiKai, which we hook up to our PC and through which we access their servers, to remotely interact with their library of games.  In return you have access to a vast selection of new and old games and continually updated hardware capabilities as they upgrade their servers and processing power.  The Cloud Gaming generation will never physically, or via a hard drive, have possession of the game itself, which in itself will mean a massive change for the gaming industry, gamers and, potentially, the highstreet.  A common issue with PC gaming is the tedious and costly requirement to upgrade your hardware to run the latest games.  With all the hardware requirements residing with the remote servers, gamers will have access to a range of games their own PC wouldn't be able to run.  This is just one of the Pro's in the Pro's and Con's of Cloud Gaming, something we'll be looking at soon.