The recent announcement of GFACE - a social media network with Cloud support, backed by Crytek - demonstrates that the concept of "gaming over IP" is likely to gain further traction as viable competition to both current and next-gen consoles. OnLive is out now with a full service, Gaikai is set to follow suit this year, and while there's a strong argument that these emerging technologies are not really a match for the local console experience, it's only fair to remember that these are first-gen technological products. They will improve, and even in the here-and-now they do work, even if the experience is quantifiably sub-optimal compared to local gaming.

The question is, to what extent can Cloud gaming services improve? Much has been made of the fact that even with ultra-fast fibre-optic networks, latency will always be an issue. Similarly, lossless video quality requires so much bandwidth (720p60 is well over 100 megabytes per second) that it's not going to be viable on gaming services. Given that video will always be compressed, to what extent can picture quality - which varies dramatically from one instant to the next - get better?

In this article we'll be tackling both of these issues, presenting the argument that improvements to internet infrastructure combined with optimising the current latency pipeline could well be enough to bridge the gap between Cloud services and what you might call a standard console experience.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 at 8:50 am and is filed under Game Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.