Streaming from the cloud was meant to change games forever – what happened?

Streaming from the cloud was meant to change games forever – what happened?. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty ImagesStreaming from the cloud was meant to change games forever – what happened?

What happened

Once hailed as the future, even the likes of Google, Sony and Microsoft have struggled to make streaming games fun, fast or affordable• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereIn August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza. ) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future. Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later. Continue reading. . .

Skip to main contentSkip to navigation Fans playing the cloud-based game Doom at the 2019 Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenFans playing the cloud-based game Doom at the 2019 Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. Once hailed as the future, even the likes of Google, Sony and Microsoft have struggled to make streaming games fun, fast or affordable Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games.

Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. This brings Microsoft’s previously unwavering commitment to cloud gaming into question – and when even Microsoft with its infinite resources can’t seem to make it work, is the writing on the wall for game streaming as a whole?

The wider picture

View image in fullscreenData-hungry. . . streaming games such as Mario Kart World requires a whole load of data. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later. Despite the fact that people simply don’t seem to want game streaming services – or at least not enough to pay a stand-alone monthly subscription for them – Sony and Microsoft have remained steadfastly committed to the idea, bundling game streaming into their PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass services.

Last week, however, Microsoft announced that it was introducing time limits for game streaming: you’re now allowed 5-15 hours a month, depending on your subscription tier. Photograph: NintendoIn the early days, the biggest problem with streaming was input lag: the time it took for the game to respond to your button-pressing. Via streaming, it would often be horribly obvious, your character taking maybe a full second to jump after you’d pressed the A button.

Not all games rely heavily on timing and finesse, but a lot of them do, and playing games on a minor time-delay felt nauseating. This is much less of an issue now, but another problem has only gotten worse: game streaming requires the instantaneous transmission of a lot of data, making it taxing on your internet connection and expensive for the service provider.

What has been reported

An hour of game streaming via Xbox requires about 4GB. The cloud gaming model has always been based on the idea that data infrastructure would become faster and cheaper in the future. Unfortunately, thanks to AI companies and their chatbots’ bottomless demand for computing power and energy, the opposite has happened. Ironically, this change has been driven by Microsoft itself as much as anything else: a huge chunk of the company’s spending went on data centres and AI infrastructure in the last fiscal year.

Only 4% of all Game Pass subscribers use it for more than 15 hours a month, Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the changes. Which brings us right back to the question: if cloud gaming really is the future, why is nobody using it? Alongside Sony and Microsoft, there is one other player left in this death match: the US-based tech firm Nvidia, whose GeForce Now game-streaming service (launched in 2013 and revamped many times since) might just be the world’s most successful.

Perhaps, when all of this shakes out, it will be the only company left that can afford to provide game streaming services at all.

What happens next

For the Ringer, frequent Guardian games contributor Lewis Gordon has written this excellent long-read on Japanese publisher Capcom’s current streak of brilliance, talking to a host of executives and developers about exactly how the company has bucked the trend while the rest of the games industry is on fire. Patrick Miller – better known as pattheflip – has published a thought-provoking reflection on how and why some players become overinvested – even dependent – on video games. “I say this as someone who has loved video games his whole life; if games serve a load-bearing function in someone’s life, it’s the life that needs fixing, not the games. ” At the end of last week, the White House released this horrible little propaganda arcade, featuring nasty riffs on popular games, such as a version of Tetris where you have to build a wall on the Mexican border to stave off “the coming horde”.

And Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is worth a look if you don’t mind cutesy. Explore more on these topicsGamesPushing Buttons newsletterfeaturesShareReuse this contentComments (…)Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussionMost viewedMost viewed It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza. ) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away.

OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents.