Why game streaming is great for Assassin’s Creed, not so for Call of Duty – yet
- Game streaming – where games are streamed from a data centre to players phones, PCs and consoles – is being touted as the industry’s future
- But while Google’s recent test with a single-player game showed the tech’s potential, fast, competitive games throw up a lot more hurdles
The first time Cory Burdette fired up Minecraft, the Lego-like adventure video game where players construct buildings out of virtual blocks, the father of a five-year-old had to wait for it to download and install on his Xbox before launching it. But by the time his daughter is old enough to play more adult games, that wait could be a thing of the past.
Major companies from Microsoft to Verizon are exploring how to replace game downloads with internet-based game services, hoping to do for video gaming what Netflix and Spotify have done with TV and music.
Instead of being run directly from a device, high-quality games of the future could be streamed from a data centre. Most of the computations and image rendering would be performed by powerful servers many miles away before being piped online to players’ phones, PCs and consoles.
Unlike passive forms of media such as movies and music, playing games over the internet calls for highly responsive technology that can interpret a player’s actions from afar, process them within milliseconds and relay the results back to the player and their opponents instantly.
The challenge has stymied gamers and game companies for years. But with advances in computing power, the adoption of high-speed broadband and fresh investments by tech behemoths, what was once a lofty technological and cultural goal for the game industry now seems closer at hand.
