The studies follow one another and all come to the same conclusion: as far as video games are concerned, the future is indeed cloud gaming. Publishers and digital giants have made no mistake: there are many intersections today, some quite asymmetrical, between companies that offer game streaming services and those that play a role in gaming platforms. -forms of television.
Microsoft is of course on board. The Redmond company is indeed very present on the video game market thanks to its Xbox console. However, it wants to go even further to conquer the living rooms by setting up a housing project used for video game streaming.
With GeForce Now, Nvidia also has a small presence in our living rooms thanks to its Shield TV, one of the few broadband TV options based on Google TV, as well as Google’s Chromecast with Google TV; both support Google’s evolving Stadia service. Not to mention Amazon, which owns Twitch and is new to the streaming game arena with Luna. The company recently launched its own line of Fire TV sets, while continuing to rank among the market leaders in streaming USB sticks and licensing the operating system to other TV manufacturers, such as Roku.
Mobile, a formidable competitor
Television represents a middle ground between the open PC platform that produces many titles on popular streaming services and mobile. Smartphones offer the biggest potential market for games, but service providers have to contend with small screens, touch controls and app store restrictions that major vendors have circumvented by targeting the browser.
TV games may represent a smaller market than games than smartphones, but while there are significant differences between the PC gaming world and the console gaming world, the two are more alike in that they have both big screens and longer gaming sessions. The question then arises: why haven’t streaming game services made more headway on TVs?
As with smartphones, there is the question of controls. When it comes to mobile, the lack of maneuverability is a criticism often leveled at smartphone games. This is enough to push publishers of cloud gaming solutions to take a very serious look at the support for a number of controllers. According to Patrick Beaulieu, business development manager of strategic partnerships for GeForce Now at Nvidia, more than three-quarters of games on GeForce Now support gamepads.
The future of video games
There is also the question of latency, which still prevents many players from falling for cloud gaming, due to domestic connections not necessarily up to scratch. While televisions far surpass smartphones in screen size, smartphones have decisive hardware advantages over televisions when it comes to networking and memory.
Cloud gaming boxes are beginning to be optimized for downstream video, buffering content so they can withstand a connectivity interruption without compromising the video experience. Again, the situation is improving and will eventually improve as TV manufacturers start implementing newer standards, such as Wi-Fi 6 and later. However, even the user interfaces of these services may require memory configurations; RAM is an expensive element in the overall cost of even high-end TVs.
Ultimately, the TV gaming market is too lucrative a market for streaming game services to ignore. While mobile platforms offer the largest potential user base, streaming games are a clear alternative for those who like mobile games that are a little more sophisticated and a little less dependent on in-game purchases. On the other hand, the number of console-PC cross-platform gaming continues to rise, it’s clear that consoles and streaming services are vying for the same players. Aligning more with Microsoft, Sony recently announced that it is increasingly considering its PlayStation business beyond the console.
Source: ZDNet.com