Games Will Rain from the Cloud

 

Like John the Elder, I've had a vision of a new reality.  But unlike John's apocalyptic prognostications, my vision, delivered via Nvidia's GeForce Now and my Samsung Chromebook, dealt with the less weighty matter of gaming.  It would seem that the world now stands on the precipice of a new future for video game entertainment, one where expensive gaming rigs, be they consoles or PCs. will be a thing of the past, a hardware accouterment as necessary to gaming as an FM radio is to the modern music scene.  In other words, superfluous.  Prepare yourself for the chrome-plated future of cloud gaming.

Don't scoff!  Just minutes ago, I played a skirmish mission in Mechwarrior 5 on my aforementioned Chromebook - and not one of the fancy models either, but a budget ~$200 model.  I played Mechwarrior 5 on that, with a $10 wireless mouse, and in a browser tab running a free* Geforce Now account hooked into rudimentary 50/50 Mbps Verizon home internet using a standard wifi router. I played Mechwarrior 5 on that, and I couldn't tell that I wasn't running it on my regular PC gaming rig.

Think about that.  What I am describing is a revolution in video gaming, one as momentous as when Atari released their 2600 game consoles back in 1977.  Video games are going to be accessible like never before. And this is going to change everything.  It is a new era for video gaming.

All screenshots captured on my Chromebook via Geforce Now

Chess: Cloud Gaming Pioneer

Pardon me a digression into my love for chess (trust me, this is related to cloud gaming).  There are two primary reasons why I have had a near lifetime passion for that game.  Firstly, at its core, chess is the most refined wargame ever devised by mankind.  Its combination of strategy and tactics is so masterfully done, albeit in a heavily abstracted fashion, that just about every turn-based wargame you have ever played, be it XCOM or BattleTech, Battle Brothers, or Age of Wonders 3, all copy chess at a fundamental level.  This is why I often find myself getting frustrated with the average PC wargame: I intuitively recognize that whatever wargame I am playing is just chess with a ton of graphical chrome, complicating factors, and some randomness dumped on top.  Once you realize that, a lot of games lose their luster.  I mean, why not just cut to the chase and focus on the strategy and tactics?  Hence, chess!

But there is a second, equally important reason.  Chess, you see, was the first true cloud game! Kinda.  Let me explain.  It wasn't that long ago that if you wanted to play chess, you had to do the standard video game thing: purchase a chess program and download/install it to your PC and run it locally.  And if you wanted to play against someone else, that usually meant using its multiplayer component to find opponents online on the program's server.  Standard gaming stuff, right? Well, that all changed with the arrival of HTML5.  With this new, more feature-rich code, chess began to move quickly away from local installs and onto web-based platforms.   Suddenly, chess players no longer needed to buy a chess program but instead could join an online chess club where a website now provided all the features of a locally-run program.  Want to play against a training bot?  You can do it online.  Want to play against other people?  You can do it online, and not just against the handful of people who purchased the same chess program as you but against hundreds if not thousands of other players worldwide who belonged to the same club.  Want to have the computer analyze your game?  You can do that too, but unlike using your PC's CPU, chess sites use the greater horsepower of a server to do so, something that often provides stronger in-depth analysis. Before long, chess players (well, casual chess players anyway) had moved almost entirely away from local installs and had come to rely on the cloud for their chess addiction.  

This, of course, made chess an extremely "portable" game.  It no longer mattered whether you had a PC or not, all that mattered is that you had a web browser and a wifi connection. What a pleasure!  Honestly, this is what contributed to my lifelong chess addiction.  Not only was the gameplay fantastic, but I could play it anywhere on almost anything.  

Such portability was not only wonderfully convenient, but it was also reassuring.  Any dedicated gamer knows that horrible feeling when you hit the power switch on your favorite gaming device and get a red circle, a blue screen, or just an inert brick.  Suddenly you are cut off from all your favorite games!**  Even if you have the cash to drop on a new device you are effectively cut off from your hobby until you can get to the store.  That's a heartbreaking First World problem!  Fortunately, chess, being now comfortably ensconced in the cloud, is free from such vulnerabilities.  PC down?  Use your phone.  Or your tablet.  Anything with a browser and a wifi hookup!  That's redundancy! 

A fleet battle in Stellaris

Here's the thing: all these strengths pioneered by the chess world are now available to mainstream gaming via the cloud!  No longer will gamers be tethered to a block of expensive hardware.  Rather, any device with a browser and a decent wifi connection will be able to play mainstream game titles.  This is a leap in gaming, the like of which hasn't been seen since the arrival of the internet itself.  No longer will gamers concern themselves with whether or not they have the hardware to run the game they want.  Heck, they won't even need specialized hardware to game - say goodbye to that expensive albatross!  In the future, you will be better off getting the best internet you can - which will still net you savings when compared to investing in hardware.

There are other benefits, too! Any gamer knows the lengthy process of installing games, something that can run into hours in this age of 50+ gigabyte installs. Guess what?  That is not an issue when playing a game in the cloud as it is already installed (and patched!) on the server. What a pleasure!  

(Just the other day I wanted to play a game that I had forgotten to install. When confronted with the idea of sitting and waiting for it to install, I instead loaded it up on Geforce Now and was happily gaming seconds later!  If I would have tried to install the title, I would have been sitting there for about 20 minutes before I could make my first mouse click.).  

Cloud gaming is a revolution, pure and simple.  Not only will it prove a tremendous convenience to dedicated gamers, but it will expose an entirely new audience to mainstream gaming, something that should lift all boats. This last point is one that many gaming pundits missed when initially discussing this new reality.  Instead of asking, 'Why would a gamer be interested in cloud gaming when they can already play games on their console/PC?', they should have been asking, "How effective will this technology be in attracting non-gamers into the hobby by removing any sort of hardware barrier?" This is key. Just as mobile gaming (i.e., gaming on smartphones and tablets) demonstrated that there was a huge untapped market of people who were open to gaming but weren't willing to invest in dedicated gaming hardware, cloud gaming is poised to do the same, perhaps with a bigger impact seeing how mainstream gaming titles are often flashier and more involving than the simplistic fare of mobile gaming. Pundits would be wise to ditch the hardware "master race" snobbery and realize that "different strokes for different folks" is as operative in gaming as it is elsewhere. (After wrongly dismissing the lucrative potential of mobile gaming ten or so years ago, you think these folks would have wised up!) More gamers mean more profits, which (should) lead to better games. If my previous points on the benefits of cloud gaming weren't sufficient, this last point alone should suffice to rally the troops to support cloud gaming. (I will not address the strong possibility of revolutionary cloud-only gaming titles until we get confirmation of such a thing. Nonetheless, that aspect of cloud gaming is very tantalizing. It is a shame that Google has already abandoned this idea as they struggle to find a well-defined business strategy for Stadia.)

Concerns 

I don't want to oversell this.  There are still obstacles to be overcome.  

Perhaps foremost amongst them are game availability.  As the early days of nVidia's GeForce Now demonstrated, not every game will be available on every service.  Even nVidia, which offered its cloud gaming service for free to game developers and publishers, had to face a backlash as certain developers/publishers objected to having their content hosted on that game platform without their explicit consent.  This objection from game makers was couched in "creative control" speak, but the truth is obvious: those who hold popular IPs are already thinking about monetizing their games via the cloud.  Why give away cloud content when you can have somebody pay for the convenience of accessing your games, be it the player or the cloud host?  If this sounds familiar it should as this is precisely what we have seen in the video-on-demand world where popular TV shows and movies are often the spoils in intense bidding wars between the big streamers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.  Clearly, gaming is heading in the same direction as more and more cloud gaming hosts come online. I suspect this is the reason why gaming heavyweights like Activision-Blizzard and Bethesda (now a division of Microsoft) have not yet released their titles on Geforce Now.  As demonstrated by Microsoft's unveiling of their own cloud-based service (Xbox Game Pass Ultimate), deep pocket publishers have their own plans for cloud gaming.

This, of course, leaves gamers in the same place as videophiles.  Say goodbye to getting all your games in one place!  Gamers will most likely be forced to subscribe to different cloud gaming services depending on which games they want to play.  This could prove to be an annoyance, to say the least.  

Of course, there is also the issue of core infrastructure - i.e., having access to high-speed internet, as well as having a cloud gaming service data center within a reasonable distance so as to minimize lag.  These are not inconsiderate concerns as large parts of the world, not to mention parts of rural America, are still lagging when it comes to such infrastructure.  This will be an ongoing battle for cloud gaming as a solid internet backbone is essential for it to work. 

Lastly, there is the issue of "mods." While this is an issue that only affects PC gamers, it is nonetheless an important concern as one of the great benefits of PC gaming is having access to unofficial third-party software modifications that can greatly enhance - and often bug-fix! - games.  The lack of mods will not endear a lot of PC gamers to cloud gaming.  Of course, this does not mean that mods will never come to cloud gaming - there is no technical reason why a cloud gaming service could not run modded servers - but it does mean that, at least for now, if you enjoy playing with mods, cloud gaming might not be for you.

Tanks on the attack in Wargame: Red Dragon

Concluding Thoughts

All in all, the above-mentioned shortfalls of cloud gaming are rather anemic when compared to its strengths.  This is why I am convinced that just as video-on-demand killed DVD players, cloud gaming will kill local gaming hardware; the benefits simply far outweigh the negatives.  Frankly, I have found it quite liberating.  After a lifetime of being tethered to expensive RAM, GPUs and CPUs, I can finally offload those concerns to someone else and just enjoy my games almost anywhere and on almost anything. My experience with Geforce Now has been so enjoyable, that it has even come to affect which games I buy - if they aren't on GFN I often pass on the purchase because I have become accustomed to cloud gaming's portability!  Heck, I have even postponed a new PC purchase because GFN has so effectively extended the longevity of my, eh, senior PC. Sure, because this is the early days of the technological revolution missteps will occur - for example, I have no idea what the heck Google is doing with their cloud gaming service, Stadia  - but I am convinced that the future is bright for this revolutionary technology. 

Remember that 1979 hit, Video Killed the Radio Star? Well, don't look now, but cloud gaming might soon get a song of its own in the not too distant future as this technology is poised to shake up a hobby that has been technologically stagnant for far too long. Exciting times!

Game on! (Anything!)

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*: I have become so enamored with Geforce Now that I have since purchased a six-month Founders plan (which has since sold out!)

**: This nightmare scenario struck my nine-year-old PC just last week.

***:  Many gamers preferred to do just that in the wake of Cyberpunk 2077's horrendously unoptimized launch.