Essay About Modern Games And Cloud Gaming

Future of Gaming
The Future of Gaming
Introduction:
There are currently three architectures being used in modern games that consists of their
own drawbacks and trade-offs such as scalability and consistency. Cloud Gaming is a new
architecture being developed that aims to overcome the problems that exists in current
architectures; however, communication latency and bandwidth has always been its problems.[1]
Large name companies like Sony has already begun purchasing Cloud Gaming companies, such
as OnLive and Gaikai[2], which will only help push the architecture forward. By streaming the
gaming content from remote cloud servers, similar to streaming videos from YouTube, all the
games will be cross-platform and much cheaper for end-users as expensive hardware will no
longer be needed to enjoy the game at its full glory. Integrating techniques and ideas from the
cloud and gaming communities into the Cloud Gaming architecture will allow developers to
overcome the wall that have once blocked the architecture from moving forward.
Problem Description:
The three common gaming architectures being used today are Client/server, Peer-to-peer
and Hybrid. Client/server architecture suffers from the inability to handle growing workload,
poor fault tolerance and expensiveness.[3] Peer-to-peer suffers from inconsistency, exploits and
complexity in integration.[4] Hybrid architecture attempts to solve the drawbacks of the prior
architectures but does not handle them as well as the gaming community hopes for.[5] Cloud
gaming aims to improve on all of these aspects and is traditionally defined as having a single
cloud server do all the work and allow users to stream the content off of the same server.
Cloud gaming is developed with the conscience that video games require a good Qualityof-
experience (QOE), which includes the consideration of precision, responsiveness and fairness.
Precision is measured by the difference between the client and server states, for example, if the
client shoots a target three times the server should register the three shots fired accurately and in