The resounding failure of Google Stadia showed the difficulty of creating viable cloud gaming services. Faced with the sheer success of those involved in series, movies or music, the video game industry it still falls short of massive deployment And most users prefer to play locally.

And video game streaming experience It’s much more complicated than that than the typical content of series and movies. Here, players jump, move or fight in an interactive and changing world. It is necessary to have not only enormous server performance, but also more advanced client machines, games optimized for this platform, and a high-level Internet connection in both speed and latency.

Cloud gaming

It is clear that this type of service has its advantages and will reach mass use in time. But there are still challenges to overcomesuch as those pointed out in HowToWeek and with which we quite agree:

Peak demand is a problem. Cloud streaming on a central server is a convenient service that allows access to everyone, but the available infrastructure is always limited. We see this when a new successful game is released that millions of users want to have access to at the same time. Service degradation occurs during rush hours and players don’t want to waste a minute waiting for their turn.

Networks are not 100% consistent. The physical networks that make up the Internet are unimaginably complex, and when you’re using a service that requires precision and responsiveness measured in milliseconds, it’s not hard to run into problems. There are times when data management from servers to devices does not exist.

Definitive DRM. Concerns about piracy are fair, but attempts to address them are questionable. And we’re talking about the “digital restrictions” that some distributors impose, which go to extremes in cloud gaming. The game never leaves the remote hardware and the player completely loses control over it. Imagine that the day after tomorrow the provider decides to remove the game you love from their service. Something that will never happen if it is your property.

Unable to select hardware. When you play in the cloud, the hardware is out of your reach and you lose the consistency that comes with privately owning your own components. Additionally, there are services whose performance varies depending on the subscription level you pay for.

A compromise between performance and quality. There are no miracles here, and streaming offers poorer visual quality if you want to maintain acceptable performance. Game streaming will always have significant quality trade-offs compared to the raw image coming from the computer’s local GPU.

Physical laws and latency. Digital signals can travel at the speed of light and reach any device instantly, even if the server is on the other side of the planet. The theory is very nice, but in practice, compressing, encoding, decoding, routing, sending and receiving packets has more inherent latency (delay) than a local PC. If it’s not relevant when you’re streaming a series on Netflix or downloading a file, those milliseconds are crucial here.

Another subscription. The rate of software piracy increased again in 2023. The fragmentation of content between streaming services and the high prices of almost all of them is one of the main reasons. Cloud gaming is another solid piece of content to pay for, and the budget has certainly been stretched for many.

Do you agree with the analysis of the situation? Prefer to continue playing locally with your own games?