Cloud gaming is the gaming industry’s future, and big names like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have already entered this growing market. But in the recent day’s cloud computing has taken a major blow in the public’s eyes.
But regardless of the problems haunting the technology, Google is continuously backing its stadia. This suggests that cloud gaming is indeed on the rise.
NVIDIA, the Graphics manufacturer, is also continuously expanding its GeForce NOW. Even the e-commerce giant Amazon is also continuously working on its Amazon Luna (still in early access) and keeps adding new games like No More Heroes. Microsoft’s xCloud has been bundled into Game Pass to make the ever-growing library of games accessible even on the go by subscribers.
The biggest limitation of cloud gaming is the availability of fast and secure cloud servers. In Microsoft’s case, its cloud gaming is built on its Azure servers and PlayFab technology, which the Xbox and Windows giant acquired about three years ago alongside the company.
“We have a number of “industry priority scenarios.” It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but they’re things that we think the industry really cares about today that may be pain points that we’re trying to help with. The first one on our list of five is to accelerate game production with the cloud.
“This act of content creation, once you have it in the cloud, distribution becomes more fluid. We see this with xCloud. It started out as just racking Xboxes in datacenters and streaming it. Now we’re getting more experience with it, and you may be able to build game experiences that would not be possible without running in the cloud. Games where you can have lots of players in a single environment interacting in new ways.
“xCloud was about putting Xboxes in the cloud *laugh* but the broader term is pixel streaming, where you’re running GPUs in the cloud and streaming it down. Initially, pixel streaming is going to be useful in non-gaming scenarios like architecture or retail where you want a 3D experience but you don’t have to have the hardware. That will then move into gaming and you’ll see developers leveraging experiences that go beyond what was possible before.”
When one particular game fails to perform on the cloud technology then we assume that the technology itself is a failure. It is a completely wrong estimation because cloud computing itself has unlimited potential.
“[…] we have voice-font technology where we can record and listen to a couple of dozen hours of someone talking, and then build a model that can recreate that person’s voice saying whatever we want them to say. When you think about that in the context of deep fakes it’s deeply troubling, but when you think about its use in casting voices for games, it could allow an indie developer with a small budget to create thousands of hours of dialogue. Even better, have the computer speak using AI in whatever voice you want, you can get some really cool creative experiences. I love the idea of using voice fonts to let the computer speak in a more natural way than you typically get today. There are neat opportunities like that coming.”
Technological giants like Google and Microsoft are quite positive about the potential of cloud gaming and strongly believe that once 5G becomes generally available cloud gaming will become a big part of the gaming industry.
