The future of gaming – Giuliano Giacaglia – Medium

Stadia was announced a year ago, and the service was received with a bit of skepticism. Pundits argued that the experience of streaming games wasnt as good as just having your console at home. But even with a slow start, Stadia might be the start of a new gaming era.

Cloud computing will have a new meaning with the introduction of gaming in the cloud. Gaming will make cloud computing a reality for consumers everywhere. For games that means that your gaming state is saved in the cloud and never lost. That there are no limits in storage and in computing, as long as you pay for it. With streaming services like Stadia, all computing happens on the cloud, and the computer just serves as a streaming box.

This concept has been floating for years, and there were a few startups that tried this idea over the years. The most notorious was OnLive. It was streaming games directly to your computer. But at the time, internet speeds werent as good as they are right now.

But internet speeds have caught up. Now, many ISP providers offer up to 1 Gbps. Something that would be unimaginable a few years ago. The average American household can stream Stadia games at 4K resolution. Stadia supports 720p at around 10Mbps and 4K video at 35 Mbps.

But Google is not the only one that betting on the fact that game streaming services will be big. Microsoft released a similar service, called Xcloud, whereas customers can stream games that they bough. Not only that, Microsoft released Xbox Game Pass, a game bundling service. Apple is also playing the long game and has also launched its own gaming subscription service, called Apple Arcade.

It is no surprise that the biggest tech companies are all looking at the same target. The Netflix of games is arriving, and it will be much bigger than Netflix.

The biggest winners of this transition will be consumers. Given that the average lifespan of a gaming console is 6 years, that meant that consumers had to wait, in average, 3 years to see their games with newer graphics and faster loading screens.

With cloud computing, whenever there is a new GPU, cloud providers can upgrade their system and consumers can take advantage of the new gaming platforms instantaneously. Not only that, but compute is not limited to one machine. Graphics will be generated by multiple GPUs.

The techniques developed in this market will be employed in other areas, opening up new opportunities for cloud computing. This will allow users to access powerful applications in the cloud, and that means that the average consumer will have access to much more powerful applications.

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The future of gaming - Giuliano Giacaglia - Medium