As Google announces the Stadia,
Christian Guyton investigates the
past and future of cloud gaming
IT’S A FUNNY THING, streaming. For movies
and TV, it’s no surprise that it’s taken
off; services such as Netflix and Amazon
Prime Video offer unlimited on-screen
entertainment at subscription premiums,
demanding only 5Mb/s to deliver HD-
quality movies to our televisions, office
computers, and cell phones. Music is even
less demanding—just ask Spotify to quote
you its crisp $1.5 billion revenue from the
last quarter of 2018. But gaming? That’s a
whole different ballpark. In fact, we’re not
even sure if it’s the same sport.
Issues that make zero difference to the
streaming of movies or music become huge
complications when games enter the fray.
Frame rate? Latency? Load times? All big
concerns. Nobody cares (or even notices,
really) if there’s two-tenths of a second
between pressing the pause button on
your Netflix Original show and the action
stopping, but such a delay could be the
difference between victory and crushing
defeat in a high-stakes match in Call of Duty.
Games—even single-player ones—chew up
bandwidth like nothing else when played
via streaming, too; 5Mb/s isn’t even close to
enough for anything remotely demanding.
Many have tried and failed to deliver the
perhaps-mythical “Netflix for games” often
discussed by developers and journalists
alike, with each doomed attempt leading to
a slew of articles touting streaming-based
gaming services as a dead medium. It’s a
tired cycle that has been struggling onward
since the early 2000s, each new attempt
drawing huge excitement before crashing
and burning to a painful halt.
Enter Google, as it always does, with its
own hot take on the latest fad. Announced
at the 2019 Game Developers Conference
in San Francisco, the Google Stadia
promises to be the Next Big Thing in the
game-streaming world. With multiplatform
support, 4K and 60fps capability, and an
evolving cloud-based infrastructure, Stadia
is perhaps the most ambitious project of this
type to date—but will it succeed? Only time
will tell, but for now, we can take a deeper
look at the history of streaming-based
gaming platforms, and what directions they
might take in the future. GETTY^ IMAGEScloud gaming
34 MAXIMUMPC JUN 2019 maximumpc.com