Microsoft wants to revolutionise the video-game industry with cloud computing
70,000 gamers, developers and publishers descended on Los Angeles to goggle at each other’s wares and show off their own at the Electronic Entertainment Expo , which began on June 11th. This year big publishers like Ubisoft and Square Enix used the annual video-game jamboree to show off previews of new games. Keanu Reeves, an actor, hyped up “Cyberpunk 2077”, a hotly anticipated title in which he plays a big role.
One of the most significant announcements at the show was also one of the briefest. Towards the end of a two-hour presentation, Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s gaming division, offered a few more details about Project xCloud, Microsoft’s foray into cloud gaming. The service will be available in October, he said, before letting gamers loose to try a demo version in the conference centre.
It all sounds promising in theory. Whether cloud gaming will catch on, though, remains uncertain, for it is technically much more demanding than existing streaming services. Unlike films or music, games are interactive, which means they must respond instantly to a player’s input. The laws of physics impose limits on how quickly a player’s commands can traverse the internet to reach a data-centre to be processed, and then how quickly the resulting video can be sent back.
The cloud giants insist that times have changed. Microsoft, Amazon and Google have data-centres dotted around the world, which should help keep response times low. Consumer internet connections are faster than ever and data allowances more generous. And although dedicated gamers may turn up their noses at even short time-lags, cloud gaming could prove attractive to the less hard-core.
Cloud computing can be used in other ways, too. Rather than running the whole game remotely, one intermediate option is to use it for tricky calculations that are also relatively insensitive to small delays. “Crackdown 3”, an action game released for thein February, uses cloud computing for complex physics calculations, allowing players to blow up their environment in a realistic way without overtaxing their computers.
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