Cloud Gaming: Dream Or Nightmare?

As Google announces the Stadia, Christian Guyton investigates the past and future of cloud gaming.

- Christian Guyton

It's-a funny thing, streaming. For movies and TV, it’s no surprise that it’s taken off; services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video offer unlimited on-screen entertainment at subscription premiums, demanding only 5Mb/s to deliver HD quality movies to our televisions, office computers, and cell phones. Music is even less demanding—just ask Spotify to quote you its crisp $1.5 billion revenue from the last quarter of 2018. But gaming? That’s a whole different ballpark. In fact, we’re not even sure if it’s the same sport.

Issues that make zero difference to the streaming of movies or music become huge complications when games enter the fray. Frame rate? Latency? Load times? All big concerns. Nobody cares (or even notices, really) if there are two-tenths of a second between pressing the pause button on your Netflix Original show and the action stopping, but such a delay could be the difference between victory and crushing defeat in a high-stakes match in Call of Duty. Games—even single-player ones—chew up bandwidth like nothing else when played via streaming, too; 5Mb/s isn’t even close to enough for anything remotely demanding.

Many have tried and failed to deliver the perhaps-mythical “Netflix for games” often discussed by developers and journalists alike, with each doomed attempt leading to a slew of articles touting streaming-based gaming services as a dead medium. It’s a tired cycle that has been struggling onward since the early 2000s, each new attempt drawing huge excitement before crashing and burning to a painful halt.