If the words of the founder of numerous successful videogame industry businesses are anything to go by, it may still be too early for cloud-based videogame services.
And the end result could be costly in preventing returns on investments for quite some time, if ever.
In a detailed op-ed over at Business Insider, DemonWare founder Dylan Collins (who is also responsile for Phorest and Jolt Online Gaming) raises several issues that may yet overload systems like Gaikai and OnLive. The first major issue: basically, it’s the Internet itself — or rather, the latency within. Since streaming-based gaming is both an upstream and downstream operation, “Any latency is going to cause trouble, particularly for real-time games. Unfortunately, the Internet is a latency-filled place.”
Collins points to the hefty capital raised by OnLive and Gaikai’s current demos-only state as a consequence of this. Nor is there any doubt that connection throttling and broadband caps (Comcast, anyone?) may cause some issues as well. Case in point: I’ve had an OnLive account since the very beginning, yet have been unable to use it because my Internet broadband connection doesn’t meet the requirements — and no, Comcast doesn’t even serve my residential area so that’s not even a part of the equation.
On the throttling and capped bandwidth issues, Collins notes that either of these wouldn’t affect the low-bandwidth and pre-determined access use of browser gaming and digital downloads, respectively. Cloud-based gaming, on the other hand, “is open-season. It’s unclear how (if at all) cloud-gaming consumers will react to ISP caps.”
But perhaps that’s not the biggest damnation of them all for cloud-based gaming — you have to remember that the games have to come from somewhere. And that can be a problem, as well. To even deal with latency issues, developers have to” build a range of tricks into the game-code itself which compensate for this slowdown. The problem for the cloud-gaming companies is that they receive the game AFTER it’s developed. Meaning that they can’t add any of their own technical wizardry into the game.” Collins therefore suggests that a whole bunch of middleware could be in order long-term.
