One of the great goals of the video game sector today is to ensure that players can play the latest news on duty like when they see the latest release on Netflix or listen to the latest album by their favorite artist on Spotify. That is to say, without the need for a device running those games natively.
Over the years there have been numerous attempts. The video game division MicrosoftXbox, has been firmly committed to cloud gaming for quite some time. Project xCloudrenamed as Xbox Cloud Gaming, has been in beta practically since 2020 and offers a subscription service in which you can play renowned video games from your mobile phone.
Business Insider Spain he was able to analyze xCloud first hand and, although he determined that it was a technology that still had a way to go, he pointed out that it was clearly the future of video games.
Other industry giants, such as nvidia (which is living its own golden age these days), offer a service that allows play video games you’ve already bought without the need for powerful hardware to run them. On the other hand, not all approaches to this technology are successful: Google was forced to shut down Stadia after attempting a similar approach.
Apparently there are a series of technical problems that make it very difficult for cloud gaming to become a reality. This has been expressed by Kenichiro Yoshida, CEO of Sony (PlayStation parent company), in an interview with the Financial Times: “The cloud itself is an incredible business model, but when it comes to games, the technical difficulties are high.”
As he points out Financial Times, Sony was one of the first companies in the sector to bet on this technology: in 2012 it bought the cloud video game company Gaikai for 380 million dollars —about 355 million euros at the current exchange rate— and later acquired the technology of Gaikai’s rival, OnLive .
However, Yoshida has pointed out that there are some inefficiencies that are costly to fix, such as servers being down most of the time and then having to deal with the high levels of traffic that are generated when users play games. at night or early morning.
Referring to these peaks of activity, the CEO of Sony has stated that they have been “a problem for both Microsoft and Google”, but has defended that they have been able to “use those hours [mas tranquilas] for artificial intelligence training.
