Cloud Gaming and the Death of the Console

Console gaming has been my favorite way to pass time since a Super Nintendo found its way into my house in the late 90’s. My brother and I would stay up all night side-scrolling our way through virtual worlds and crashing 8-bit race cars. I still dust off my old Nintendo 64 when it's time to settle things the old-fashioned way-- Super Smash Bros. 1v1 (no items). If you know, you know. If you don’t, don’t worry. By the time you catch up on the history of at-home gaming the next technological disruption will be in full effect. Console gamers are notorious for getting in online arguments about why the PlayStation controllers are better or why XBOX is a faster console. Some fans seem to live for this discourse. Little do they know; within 5-10 years the console will be another relic in the archives of gaming glory. As long as humans have a need to play, smart people will be creating ways to do it faster, stronger, cheaper, and more beautifully. New technologies will continue to be developed and businesses will continue to bring us services to leverage them.

Multiplayer blew out the cramped living room couches and bedroom floors when broadband internet and XBOX Live joined forces. Streaming used to be me watching over my brother’s shoulder, patiently waiting for my turn to play which always seemed to come around a whole lot less often than his. Now I can pick up my phone and watch thousands of gamers across the world playing all types of games for all types of people, but we will get into the Esports and Streaming phenomenon another time. We’re here to talk about one thing: Cloud Gaming and why this technology is going to completely redefine what it means to game at home.

As I write this, I can’t help but to peer over at my PS4 quietly sleeping on my dresser. It has served me well. For the sake of avoiding embarrassment I won’t tell the exact number of hours I have dumped into it but let's just say it's in the weeks. These are well made machines with a very well-designed ecosystem, chock full of games and (mostly) reliable online gaming. They do their job masterfully. What is their job? To cram everything that it takes to play the best games into a fairly small, plug-and-play box. As processor’s get stronger, smaller, and lower energy, new generations come out and more realistic graphics come to games. At the end of the day, what you can do is limited by the hardware in that box, until now.

Shortly put, Cloud Gaming is remotely borrowing resources from other machines to play on a less powerful machine. Let’s do a real quick history, from a gamer’s point of view. To give credit where credit is due, I have to mention G-Cluster who debuted the first example of it at E3 in 2000. For a number of reasons, it never really took off. Fast forward about 10 years and OnLive launched their own version of Cloud Gaming alongside their “microconsole”. Again, a bit ahead of its time in terms of technology. I think it’s fair to say that the average gamer most likely first experienced this technology with the Sony launch of Playstation Now in 2014. Sony bought up a company called GaiKai and reworked their technology to offer their users a service where they can play a huge catalog of PS1, 2, and 3 games that were frustratingly not forward compatible on the PS4. It’s like Netflix where the game isn’t downloaded or stored on your device except cross-apply that to processing too. Again, amazing concept in theory but had trouble driving adoption due to the fact that if you lost connection even for a moment you were back to square one. Sony also was the first to let you play your console remotely. I can be at work on my MacBook, plug in my DualShock controller and back home my PS4 will whirr to life and begin processing my games on my computer’s behalf while I play at work. This is hypothetical of course I would NEVER play video games at work... but another good example of Cloud Gaming in action.

Since then, a number of successful Cloud Gaming services have become available to players around the world. A French startup, Blade, launched Shadow in France in 2017. From the beginning users with strong internet connections were extremely impressed. Not only would it work as described but their laptop fans wouldn’t even need to spin. Now there were some issues, especially when new drivers would come out for the GPU’s in the gaming servers. A lot of these problems have been ironed out and their paying subscribers jumped from 20,000 in July 2018 to well over 65,000 today. Available in 7 countries, including some of the United States, the company is now focusing on ways to more effectively scale to demand, a good problem to have. A number of big names are fighting over their own slice of this quickly growing market. Everyone from NVIDIA, to EA to Microsoft and Google have made significant investments promises in the field of Cloud Gaming. But this raises an important question: if so many people are willing to pay monthly for remote resources, what does that mean for hardware at home?

Users have grown accustomed to being at the will of their chosen console and the businesspeople at Sony and Microsoft. Cross-play or no cross-play, console-exclusive games, price regulation of their digital markets, and lack of forward compatibility are just a few examples. Console gamers have to make a decision every time the next version comes out, a decision that will determine which games they can play, who they can play with, and how their controller will feel. Do I buy PlayStation or XBOX? Not to mention, can I afford another $500 machine? For these players to learn about a service that focuses on the game and not the platform, that is agnostic of system, supports a variety of controllers, that can scale up and down to meet my needs, that comes in bite-size monthly payments—can you blame them when they sell off their consoles and sign up for Shadow or Stadia or any of the many other strong Cloud Gaming offerings?

A shift is coming. A time where the gamers take back the power. Will consoles ever completely die? No. Like I said, I still keep my Nintendo 64 around because even over 20 years later it holds some relevance. There are limiting factors to Cloud Gaming like the need for strong, reliable internet and users needing machines that can support the software. But as more and more gaming happens online and internet gets cheaper and stronger and more accessible, the console manufacturers better watch their backs because every day we march closer to a day where I can play what I want, where I want, with whom I want and I do not have to give into false limitations.