Blog: The Cloud of Gaming
Possibilities that the near future has in turn for us.
Internet infrastructure has been improving on a massive scale the past couple of years. Every year more and more people are getting connected with faster speeds, higher stability and less latency. The development of such a strong infrastructure is yet to be completely explored as we are only beginning to see what possibilities we can utilize these large advancements for.
In the gaming scene, the PC was the first to toy with these capabilities by offering a more connective experience while playing online. Steam for example enabled players to chat with people in their friends list in a much more integrated method. Steam also uses cloud-computing to store your data and profile on their servers, hence you can access steam on any computer with your specific account and be able to replicate the game library you have. Walking the same steps as steam, Battle.net 2.0 when launched with starcraft 2 really gave you the ability to save your complete settings and save files on the cloud and hence don’t have to worry about any “accidents” happening on your PC.
Battle.net 2.0 sure didn’t please many people in some aspects, but it did include a couple of really great cloud based features.
These series of advancements are continuing day by day, and recently we have seen glimpses of what is recently being called “cloud-gaming”. The first to fully implement the could-gaming experience is a company called Onlive. Cloud-gaming gave users the ability to stream games from their servers onto your device. This basically means that you now don’t have to constantly upgrade your PC every couple of years to match games. The immediate noticeable problems however with such a system in current times is that the quality of your gaming experience heavily relies on your internet speed and stability. It just feels that it will take more time before something like this gets really big and begins to expand worldwide.
