CAN CLOUD GAMING REALLY WORK?
where they live, what the demand is, and who is going to be playing those games. We know who has reserved a game. This will allow us to invest behind demand. We can scale by adding machines to offer customers a one-at-a-time experience when they’re streaming from the cloud.
GameStop’s Bartel says the retailer will create a subset of tablets aimed specifically at gamers
The challenge is to find a way to send your video directly to those chips so that they can decode it and get it on the screen with the lowest amount of latency possible. That’s what we’ve put enormous effort into. It opens gaming on every device that you can imagine.
Bartel: Based on what we have seen so far, we are excited about the potential these tablets have and really don’t feel like we’re going to need to create our own tablet. Our plan is to create a small subset of tablets that will be the Alienware of tablets, if you will. They will be optimised tablets for gaming that will have either wired or wireless controllers. Gamers will be able to unlock themselves from the form factor of just having an accelerometer and a touch-pad, which significantly increases the complexity options of the games.
Demand for online games can be very unpredictable. Core games are much more resource intensive than casual games. Is this unpredictability and potential costs a concern when planning your move towards the cloud? Farrell: When launching an online game, publishers predict the number of players they’ll need to support over time and then plan accordingly. Ideally, we could launch a game with a base level of supported players and have the ability to rapidly scale that up or down to suit demand.
16 July 15th 2011
One of the huge benefits of cloud computing is the ability to quickly start up new servers or shutdown under-used ones, meaning publishers only pay for what they use. Traditionally, starting up new servers can be time-consuming, expensive and slow so cloud computing holds huge promise in overcoming some of those challenges.
Hilleman: I don’t think core gaming online is always more demanding. The number of users per server for a game like Battlefield is pretty comparable to those of casual games. The difference is core games really are very thick client games. They really demand a lot out of the consoles or the PCs that they’re running on. The question is whether it’s a thin client [basic game] or a thick client [complex game] project. We think the efficiencies that underlie those systems are a continuous source of innovation that we have to work on. If you take the size of these systems, modest amounts of money become large amounts with small changes in those infrastructures. We’re going to pursue efficiencies because they’re very easy to realise.
Bartel: One of the reasons we bought Spawn Labs is it allows us to start from the ground up and develop tech around our PowerUp Rewards system [GameStop’s customer reward card]. We know exactly what games people have and which games they are going to be playing. We know
$6.4bn
The amount of money GameStop expects DLC to generate by 2014
“
Are data centres the answer to latency issues or could games be optimised for the cloud during development? Farrell: The quality of gamers’ experience ‘on the cloud’ depends on how quickly and consistently they can access the network – better connections obviously translate to a better experience. Latency is dictated largely by the distance between the player and the server, and the amount of data being sent over the network. So it’s our responsibility as publishers to look at the latency issue from all sides, considering data centres and developing games optimised for the cloud. Whether that means reducing the video resolution or coding specifically for an online game logic or adding more server locations, the potential solutions vary widely.
Hilleman: At EA, we’re doing about 30 different products that have some form of digital distribution, or digital backend. Usually latency will be solved either by the right geographic deployment relative to the major pipes, or it’s going to have such a dispersed deployment that that doesn’t matter as much. For some games, if you want to run a streaming gaming service, the quality of your bandwidth and configuration of your servers are important.
Our current
experience is that the App Store model is essentially in freefall. Richard Hilleman, Electronic Arts
Perry: It’s got to be data centres as you’re dealing with the speed of light. I guess that’s one of the interesting things. OnLive launched at three data centres, we launched at 24. The objective was to get as close to users as possible. An independent study says we’re faster than OnLive in 25 out of 26 markets globally.
This report was compiled by Cloud Gaming USA. A new event for the burgeoning cloud gaming sector that takes place in San Jose, USA on Wednesday, September 7th and Thursday, September 8th.
http://www.cgconfusa.com/
www.mcvuk.com
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