The Future of Cloud Gaming [Point of View]

In the late 2000s, several startups including OnLive [7] and GaiKai [8] started to offer cloud gaming services. Cloud gaming, as illustrated in Fig. 1, refers to the technologies that offload parts of game software from traditional game consoles or personal computers (PCs) to powerful and elastic cloud infrastructures. Cloud gaming makes perfect sense to: 1) gamers, who otherwise have to constantly upgrade their consoles or PCs, which is certainly no fun and costly; 2) cloud service providers, who can sell the already-deployed and idling cloud resources to support the cutting-edge games that are extremely resource hungry; and 3) game developers, who no longer need to spend months to port their games to different platforms. As such, cloud gaming has attracted significant attention from both academia and industry. Initially, given the limited scales of these startups, people were not sure whether cloud gaming could be commercially successful. A fundamental question that came to people, inside and outside the gaming circle, was: Will the three dominating console manufacturers, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, be willing to give up their margin of selling the game consoles? The answer was initially unclear, and many suspected that these console manufacturers would be more than happy to kill cloud gaming in order to remain profitable. The opposite actually happened: Sony acquired GaiKai in 2012 for $380 million, announced the new service PlayStation Now (PS Now) in early 2014, and brought PS Now to parts of the world in 2015. Using PS Now, Sony allows their customers to play hundreds of PlayStation 3 (PS3) games on the latest PlayStation 4 (PS4) consoles without porting the games. Sony has also unveiled a plan to: 1) allow gamers to use other PlayStation consoles and smart TV to access PS Now; and 2) include game titles developed for other generations of PlayStations on PS Now. The emerging PS Now service indicates that cloud gaming has great potential to become the next-generation, universal computer gaming platform. Offering high-quality cloud gaming experience with the remote cloud through the public Internet, however, is no easy task. Current cloud gaming services have leveraged real-time video streaming technologies that have a long history of development. They share certain common characteristics, including high bandwidth demand and real-time constraints. Yet the demands of gaming are often higher than live or on-demand video streaming. Certain cloud gaming services dictate a network bandwidth of about 5 Mb/s for smooth gaming experience, which Corresponding author: Jiangchuan Liu (e-mail: [email protected]).