Cloud Gaming and Competitive Online Games!
“As the CEO/founder of WTFast, I am asked at least once per month what I think about Cloud Gaming (Streaming) services. I am asked this because WTFast has been focused for the last nine years on making online games faster and smoother; we help gamers to win when they play competitive online games.”
The Cloud Gaming Magic Bullet
For about 20 years now, cloud gaming has been promoted as the magic bullet for online games. All your worries will go away. You no longer have to install anything. You can play any game, on any device (regardless of how horrible the device is), with no lag. Sounds amazing, right? Over the years, dozens of companies have been working on delivering this magic bullet. A quick review of Wikipedia will show a history of Cloud Gaming:
Many have tried to deliver this promise, and many have failed. None have achieved major consumer success with game streaming for competitive online gaming. Why is this?
Massive Bandwidth Requirements
To deliver a mediocre game experience, with an FPS rate you can live with and graphics comparable to watching a low-resolution video on Youtube, you could expect to use about 25-50Mbit/sec in bandwidth while you are doing game streaming. At this rate, you could expect to use around 10-25GB per hour of gameplay. So if you play around 8 hours per week on average, you will be using about 1TB of data in a month, just for your game streaming.
If you will be using 1TB of data for game streaming, why wouldn't you download and install the game instead? Even if you have an older computer and you have to dial down the game settings, you would still have a much better gaming experience by installing the game locally.
Traditional competitive online games were designed to use little bandwidth. You install the game on your local computer, and everything is rendered on your local computer. Small bits of telemetry data are sent to and from the game server to tell your computer where things should be in the game. This design is very effective, making for a great gaming experience with little bandwidth needed. A typical online game with a 100 Kbit/sec connection would only use up about 50MB of bandwidth (at most) in an hour, which is about 500 times less traffic than required for game streaming.
Think about that, for game streaming to have any hope of having success, the companies providing these services need to figure out how to deliver 500 times more bandwidth to all of their users. Given the complexities of the Internet, with bottlenecks everywhere (including the game streaming versus Netflix fight in your household), this is no small task.
Horrible Input Lag
Even if you happen to live close to an edge server for game streaming, because of the way the technology works, there is going to be a noticeable increase in input lag compared to traditional online gaming. When gamers communicate with the cloud server, you are effectively telling the cloud server what video should be rendered. The video is then rendered from the server and streamed back to you. Assuming there are no problems with the data stream, you can expect this process to increase your game lag by a factor of 3-4x. For example, if your ping to the edge server is around 25ms, your game lag will probably increase to around 100ms. If your ping to the edge server is 100ms, your game lag will likely increase to around 400ms. This is insane! Playing with this kind of lag would make the game unplayable, and you would be utterly destroyed by other players.
Limited Geo Reach
The primary reason game streaming has never taken off is because of the limitations of the technology and how hard it is to achieve and maintain critical mass in any given location. Due to the massive bandwidth requirements, you want your data to travel as short a distance as possible so you can avoid bandwidth bottlenecks and hot potato routing. As a result, you are restricted to playing on a cloud server in your city. The input lag multiplier is another factor that will limit you from playing anywhere else but your city. If your data has to travel too far, the 3-4x increase in your game ping is going to destroy your game experience.
If you don't have an edge server close to your city? Good luck. You aren't going to have a good experience with game streaming.
Achieving and maintaining critical mass is a major problem with game streaming. This is hard enough with any online game. Typically while playing online games, you play with other players across the country or even across the world. This large geo reach enables game companies to capture enough players, so you have enough players to play with and against whenever you want to play. Due to technical limitations, you can only play with gamers in your city with game streaming. Good luck achieving critical mass!
One consideration is game streaming mixed with a traditional AAA title, such as PUBG or Fortnite. These traditional titles will have no problem attaining critical mass. The challenge you are going to have is competing against the players using the traditional clients. If you are game streaming, you will be at a significant disadvantage, with input lag 3-4x greater than someone in the same city and likely lower FPS as well. Any serious gamer will get frustrated with this and want to play the traditional installed game instead, so they don't have to play with a "streaming handicap".
The Only Way Game Streaming Makes Sense...
The only way game streaming makes any sense would be for game streaming companies to not spend another 20 years trying to fit traditional online games into the game streaming mold. Traditional online games are not going to work with game streaming. Twenty years later, it still hasn't happened.
What needs to happen is game companies need to make games that are designed for game streaming. Instead of treating streaming as a handicap, use streaming as a way to deliver some cool and unique new games. Take a gamble and try something different.
In addition to the handicaps, game streaming is plagued with, and there are also a lot of strengths.
For example:
A game designed for mobile devices focused on being social or geo-specific (think Pokemon Go). This is essential since you need to build that critical mass in your city so you can play the game at all.
Create unique/dynamic Augmented Reality (AR) content; this is where the game streaming can come in. Imagine fighting a super realistic giant dragon in the middle of a city park with your friends. Or a rotting zombie horde at your favorite restaurant. Pokemon Go is the Pong of AR; we can do a lot better than that.
Since the game is designed for smaller mobile screens, the game stream quality could be reduced (requiring less bandwidth). Even less bandwidth is needed if you are doing AR since you are only streaming the AR video content.
Imagine your home city being transformed into a new AR world, streaming whatever cool skin/theme/monsters (medieval, zombies, holocaust, etc.) you can think of to your mobile device as you walk around.
Imagine going to your favorite sporting event, and get a chance to virtually sit beside your teams' players sitting on the bench (profanity filters on or off). That would be an amazingly immersive experience and a great use case for game streaming technology.
Imagine having a lifelike virtual friend who follows you everywhere you go, "leveling up" in different scenarios, gives you advice, interacts with other people's virtual friends, etc. Way cooler than Siri or Alexa!
Or we could spend another 20 years trying to make traditional online games work with game streaming. Insanity?