Streaming or the announced revolution of video games

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After music and film, video games could well be the next industry to go digital with the arrival of streaming, where software will be distributed from data centers rather than being installed on computers or video game consoles.

Google garnered attention this week by unveiling its Stadia platform, which can stream large-scale video games to computers, tablets, phones, and even smart TVs. With a system like this, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on a powerful console to enjoy the latest Assassin’s Creed. A screen, a controller, and a good internet connection are all you need.

Google isn’t the only company betting on this technology. Microsoft, which produces the Xbox One console, is working on the xCloud service, which will also benefit from the power of modern data centers, and Nintendo recently tested a similar service for Switch users in Japan.

Streaming was the hot topic this week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Yet the phenomenon is nothing new. For example, the company OnLive offered a streaming platform as early as 2011. Sony, for example, is following suit with its PlayStation Now service, launched in 2014.

Much has changed since the release of these first services, which never really took off. Internet connections are,o n average, faster today than in 2011, servers are more powerful, and the technologies behind video compression are more efficient than before. “We are now at a point where technology allows us to offer an experience of the same quality as a video game console, provided we have the right cloud infrastructure, the right content, and a good community in place,” Microsoft’s head of cloud gaming, Kareem Choudhry, recently stated in a statement.

The Benefits of Streaming

Streaming isn’t just about replicating console quality, at least in theory. It also offers unique advantages over traditional gaming.

“Overnight, almost every screen around us will be able to be used to play video games. This has the potential to significantly increase our user base in the very short term,” explains Marc-Alexis Côté, senior producer of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at Ubisoft Quebec.

And it’s going to be even bigger with the arrival of 5G mobile networks, since you’ll be able to play on the road without needing your internet at home,” continues the man who last year oversaw the port of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to Project Stream, a trial version of the Stadia platform. A player will be able to play on their television, pause their game, and resume it on their phone on the bus, for example.

“This will allow us to democratize video games,” summarizes Majd Bakar, vice president responsible for the Stream project, who met on the sidelines of the GDC, where L’actualité attended at the invitation of Google.

By taking advantage of the power of modern data centers, developers will also have access to much more power than they currently have to create their games.

“We’ll be able to see more realistic games with more depth. Worlds could be destructible, and we could develop an online battle royale game  [Editor’s note: like Fortnite ]  where thousands of players compete against each other instead of 100. Will that make games more interesting? We don’t know, but we’re giving developers these tools to allow them to create titles they can’t design now,” the engineer continues.

The technology could also transform the way games are marketed. With Stadia, for example, you could click a link in a YouTube trailer to start a game in less than five seconds. An online game broadcaster could invite viewers to join them directly in the game.

Pitfalls to be expected

While the concept of streaming games may be appealing, the technology also has very real limitations. In a test at GDC, where conditions were far from ideal, L’actualité observed a considerable reduction in the graphics quality of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey when it was streamed over the internet, and a longer-than-normal delay between sending a command via the controller and the on-screen reaction.

Google hasn’t announced what internet connections will be required to play Stadia, which will launch by the end of 2019, but the speed and proximity of the company’s servers will have an impact on the quality of the game. The situation will be the same for Microsoft, with its xCloud service.

“In the future, maybe they’ll offer incredible graphics quality and a refresh rate of 240 frames per second [Editor’s note: a measurement particularly prized by professional gamers], but we’re still a long way off. The technology doesn’t yet offer the performance of a good computer,” observes Ryan McCall, director of strategy and development for the benchmarking division at UL, a company specializing in analyzing the performance of electronic devices.

Not everyone will be able to enjoy streaming services. After all, some 340,000 households in Quebec are still without high-speed internet, and even fast connections are not always reliable.

Slowed reaction times in streaming games may also affect players’ experience in some games. A title like Assassin’s Creed isn’t affected by this issue, but competitive action games are.

In the short term, games designed for large TVs may also be poorly suited for smaller phone screens, for example. However, it’s likely that developers will modify their interfaces over time to correct this problem.

What place will this technology occupy?

For Google, streaming represents the future of video games. “It’s the beginning of a new chapter. If you look at what’s happened in music and video, I think the future is streaming,” believes Majd Bakar.

Microsoft offers a more nuanced view. “We are not developing Project xCloud as a replacement for consoles, but as a way to give users choice,” Kareem Choudhry wrote recently.

“For me, it’s not a question of whether streaming will replace consoles, but rather when it will,” says Marc-Alexis Côté.

For the Ubisoft Quebec producer, streaming won’t even need to address all of its shortcomings for this transition to occur. “Today, you can buy a movie on disc and get better video quality than online. But for people, the immediacy of online rentals is more advantageous than getting maximum quality. It’s going to be the same with streaming games. There will be a generational shift, and people will be more able to tolerate these constraints.”

But you still need to have a decent internet connection. Remember that in the last federal budget, the government implemented measures to connect all Canadians to high-speed internet by 2030. Streaming may be making video games more accessible, but it will be many years before everyone can enjoy them. Until then, consoles will undoubtedly still have their place in the industry.

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