CLOUD BASED GAMING

The Emergence of Cloud Based Computer Games

The Emergence of Cloud Based Computer Games

Introduction

The world of IT has gone through a number of phases led by technological changes. In the earlier days, computers were not that capable as they stand out today. The abilities of the computers were very limited at that time. Only some specific tasks were performable through them. However, as time passed on, computers evolved into much capable machines capable of performing sophisticated tasks. A number of tasks that required human intervention for their completion became automated due to advanced capabilities of modern computers.

A number of technological evolutions have taken place since the rise of computers. A similar technology that is very much in fashion at present is cloud computing. It is defined as technology in which IT related and computing capabilities are provided to the user, as a service, using internet access. Users can obtain networked storage space and computing resources by subscribing to the cloud computing service. Mostly software, platform or infrastructure is provided as a service from a remote location over the internet in cloud computing. At present, cloud computing is considered as one of the rapidly growing technologies (Kim, 2009, pp. 65-72).

One of the emerging applications of cloud computing is gaming, termed as cloud based gaming or simply cloud gaming. It is also known as gaming on demand and comes under the umbrella of online gaming. In cloud gaming, the games are originally installed on the gaming provider's or operator's servers, and is streamed to the user according to demand. An important feature of cloud gaming is that there is no need of gaming console and this adds greatly to the convenience and mobility to play games online. Moreover, since the games are actually running on servers hosted by the provider or the company, therefore there is no significance of the term “system requirements” in case of cloud gaming. As a result of these features that are associated with cloud gaming, it has become an emerging technology that is being widely deployed.

Discussion

“Cloud-based streaming technology has transformed the movie and music industries by delivering unlimited content to consumer devices, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and TVs. Millions of users now experience the convenience of streaming video and music services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and Pandora.” (http://www.nvidia.com)

The history of cloud gaming is not very old. Perhaps it dates back to 2000 when a company named G-cluster launched gaming on-demand technology in Finland. Since then, cloud based gaming is on the up. With the passage of time, the number of users of cloud gaming are rapidly increasing. The reason behind this rapid increase is the features that come with cloud gaming such as independence of system specifications and mobility. Various researchers are looking forward to enhance this technology to a virtual environment but for this they have to design such hardware which can support the independence of system configuration and mobility. In the world today nothing seems to be impossible but still the ...