From OnLive to Google Stadia, the development of cloud gaming in the video game industry has been far from smooth sailing.
In the summer of 2011, Robert Stevenson and Tim Wilson fromCloud gaming company Gaikai, based in Aliso Viejo, California, boarded a plane to arrive at Samsung Digital City in Suwon, South Korea, more than 13 hours later. They planned to launch playable demos of several games, including Mass Effect, from a server in California more than 9,300 kilometers away, thereby impressing the nearly four dozen Samsung employees and executives gathered in the conference room. It took a lot of ingenuity to ensure smooth video playback in Samsung's secure headquarters, given that the room was isolated from the Internet for security purposes, making unhindered network access problematic. I had to improvise: a twisted pair cable was lowered from a window along the façade of the building and connected to a router several floors below.
“You can cook in the most thorough waypresentation, but it’s impossible to foresee that, ”recalls Stevenson, a former chief of production control and executive vice president of Gaikai. - But we miraculously got out of the situation, and the demo started. We showed the gameplay and it looked quite convincing. "
Gaikai's presentation that day helpedenter into an agreement with Samsung that enabled the South Korean consumer electronics giant to show demo versions of games launched from servers in North America on Samsung TVs. The partnership with the leading manufacturer has allowed Gaikai to strike deals with a variety of other companies, including Facebook, Walmart, Best Buy, LG and Google, making Gaikai a tasty morsel for Sony, which acquired it in June 2012 for $ 380 million. The startup's underlying streaming technology is at the heart of PlayStation Now.
In May 2020, Sony announced that the servicePlayStation Now has 2.2 million subscribers, but that number pales in comparison to PlayStation Network's 130 million monthly active users and the 106 million-plus PlayStation 4 consoles sold to date. PlayStation Now's subscriber base reflects the harsh reality of cloud gaming.
The slightest packet loss can completely spoil the signal
Over the past 15 years, has appeared and has sunk into oblivionmany cloud gaming services, such as OnLive and GameFly, lured in the promise of high-quality gaming experiences and low network latency for video streaming to PCs, game consoles, tablets and smartphones from remote servers. However, technical issues and lack of gaming exclusivity often prevented these services from delivering a cloud gaming experience comparable to that of games launched from home devices, and a healthy dose of consumer skepticism has permanently cemented these services to a marginal status. While the next generation of cloud gaming services such as Google Stadia, Nvidia's GeForce Now, Microsoft's xCloud, and Amazon's recently announced Luna are set to make a difference, the battle for global acceptance, especially in the face of intense competition, may be as tough as ever.
“In cloud gaming, the biggest problem isis that the gameplay should be no different from the usual, and without the need to buy a game console, - said the managing director of Wedbush Securities, Michael Pakter, who advises clients on investment issues. - All your actions must be processed in the "cloud" and, accordingly, transmitted via the Internet to the server and back to me and you, so that we both can follow the game, so huge amounts of data are exchanged. The slightest packet loss can completely spoil the signal. And if this problem is not solved, then everything else does not matter anymore. "
The origins of cloud gaming as it standsknown today, leaving in March 2009 when Steve Perlman announced OnLive at the Game Developers Conference. Encouraged by the latest technological developments, including improved data and video compression, and the ever-increasing adoption of smartphones, Pearlman concluded that the time had come to move gaming to the cloud, and that was exactly what it was during the conference. he promised to do it. The OnLive service would allow gamers, by paying a subscription fee and paying an additional rental or purchase price, to access games "on demand" with 720p resolution at 60 frames per second.
In a recent interview with the Polygon website, Pearlman said, "The desire to create completely photorealistic video footage in games prompted me to make a decision: we will develop it."
By 2009, Perlman already enjoyed an impressivereputation in Silicon Valley. He helped create the multimedia software that would become QuickTime and also created WebTV, selling the technology to Microsoft in 1997 for $425 million. However, he was practically unknown to the tightly knit gaming community, and he had yet to establish himself in the eyes of developers and gamers.
“I think it was hard for Steve to navigateindustry, because she is very closed, and he was a stranger to her. Steve's ego could not come to terms with the fact that his talent was allegedly not respected, even if it all boiled down to the fact that someone from the leadership of the game development company came up first to say hello to me, and then to him, - explained the long-time veteran of gaming industry familiar with this issue. "The gaming industry is really hard to penetrate, but once you get into it, it all starts to resemble high school in a small town: you then constantly meet the same people, only in different situations."
Could Pearlman really be “his” for the industry and still convince it of the merits of his cloud service?
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When the cloud bill comes in ... Illustration: Richard. E. Chance for Polygon
He definitely tried, resorting to expensivemarketing campaigns, renting out large booths at the Game Developers Conference and E3, and putting intense pressure on the Palo Alto, California-based company to get its games on the OnLive platform. While game publishers like Ubisoft, 2K Games, and THQ helped build OnLive's initial catalog of about a dozen games at the platform's launch (which grew to more than 100 within a year), later deploying other AAA games to OnLive proved challenging. . Many other publishers, accustomed to paying full price for games upfront, were wary of OnLive's Netflix-like operating model and the prospects for the industry if the startup took off.
Gaikai was favored by publishers -a cloud-based gaming service run by David Perry, an established industry veteran behind games like Earthworm Jim, MDK and Enter the Matrix. At Gaikai, the emphasis was on offering demos rather than full games, which, from a publisher's point of view, posed no threat to them. As Gaikai grew more and more vendors and partners, OnLive struggled to negotiate new high-budget games to be hosted, and three former employees told Polygon that OnLive generally viewed Gaikai as a serious competitor.
"It was pretty intense, it was real competition, but it was also an incentive for us."
OnLive was launched on June 17, 2010, and inon the same day Gaikai announced the conclusion of a long-term agreement with Electronic Arts. According to former OnLive employees, Pearlman flew into a rage during a service meeting, screaming and demanding that all Electronic Arts games be removed from the platform immediately, including those tested in beta. These employees told Polygon that they had to close the conference room door and play loud music to drown out Pearlman's screams. Pearlman himself does not remember the screams, but admits that he was very upset, discussing the situation on the phone with the then head of Electronic Arts, John Riquitello.
During a conversation with Polygon, Gaikai CEO David Perry recalled the past rivalry between OnLive and Gaikai as a particularly tense period.
“In fact, whenever I went out aftermeetings in the office of some company, in the lobby there was already an OnLive representative who was received after me. In other words, we met the same people, ”Perry recalls. "It was quite intense, it was real competition, but it was also an incentive for us."
Gaikai has never published numberstheir subscribers to game demos. Stevenson believes that due to the platform's focus on streaming free demos, there was no “subscriber base” in its traditional sense. OnLive, on the other hand, had 275,000 monthly active users, 150,000 weekly and 50,000 daily, according to service data obtained by Polygon. These numbers pale in comparison to the 2.2 million PlayStation Now subscribers and clearly did not add credibility to OnLive in the eyes of those game publishers who were already wary of placing their products on the platform.
Former OnLive senior vice president of games and media, John Spinale, likened the startup’s difficulty with content to the chicken and egg issue.
"How to get publishers and developers interested in supporting your platform if you don't have users and you won't have users until there is content?" Spinale asks.
In 2012, Hewlett-Packard turned toOnLive with an offer to acquire a startup. The tech giant even provided a $15 million short-term loan to OnLive, which had monthly expenses of $5 million at the time, with about 20 percent of that going toward server costs and the rest mostly toward salaries for about two hundred employees. But in July 2012, Hewlett-Packard pulled out of the deal without much explanation and leaving Perlman and OnLive in limbo over the need to repay a $15 million loan and find a new buyer. A month later, Perlman found such a buyer in Gary Lauder, managing director of the venture capital firm Lauder Partners. He acquired OnLive's assets in August 2012 through a newly formed company, OL2, paying $4.8 million for them - less than 1% of the $1.1 billion OnLive was valued at two years earlier.
"Cloud gaming has come to be seen as a disaster of sorts."
Although OnLive initially stated that Pearlmanwill remain in the post of CEO, in the same month he left the company to "pursue numerous projects." Loder then worked with Acting CEO Charlie Jeblonski, a former production manager, to save the company; in an effort to cut costs, they cut two-thirds of OnLive's workforce. Subsequent attempts to turn things around included launching a new feature called CloudLift, which detected games previously purchased by users in order to try to run them on almost any device. But it was all in vain.
“You know, at the moment when I saved the company,cloud gaming was still popular, Loder recalled. "But partly because of the negative press coverage of the layoffs and transitions at the company, which, in hindsight, could be said to have been improperly conducted, cloud gaming has come to be seen as a kind of disaster."
Sony acquired OnLive in April 2015 toshut it down four weeks later, while Gaikai became a key element in Sony's development of its PlayStation Now platform. Looking at OnLive years later and his attempt to popularize cloud gaming, Pearlman remains proud of what his startup has achieved as a pioneer in this space and regrets the liquidation of the company. For former employees, OnLive was a classic example of a product or service ahead of its time.
“We were a small motley team,which in a very short time during the Great Recession managed to outstrip all the other years in development by ten years, says Perlman. “It's a shame that we didn't make it a few inches to the finish line, or a few inches to be safe, because if Hewlett-Packard had bought us, then of course we would have worked as long as we like.”
Despite the failure of OnLive, attempts to launchcloud gaming did not stop. Sony unveiled the PlayStation Now beta in July 2014. Around the same time, Nvidia and Google began rolling out their own versions of cloud gaming platforms.
In 2013, Nvidia started testinga service that worked on a different principle. Instead of streaming games that were not purchased by players, Nvidia Grid enabled users to stream games previously purchased from online stores such as Steam. The service, later renamed GeForce Now, ran on Macs, Chromebooks, Windows PCs, Android TVs, and mobile devices.
“PC gamers told us that there is nothe need to open another game store with a limited range, especially since most of them already had accounts on Steam, Epic and Uplay for the games they bought, says Andrew Fire, senior product manager at GeForce Now. "And they gave more and more preference to free-to-play games."
According to Nvidia, since the release of GeForce Now frombeta status in February 2020, more than 4 million people have become subscribers to the service, and the monthly streaming volume amounted to 15 million hours. However, the unfamiliar business model of GeForce Now also raises doubts in terms of copyright protection. When a user buys a digital key for a game, it is usually clearly implied that the game will run in a specific format. But the GeForce Now platform broke those rules. Yes, the purchased digital game technically belongs to the player, but will it play correctly in a format other than the one provided by the publisher? At the same time, we omit all other possible problems, such as the need for developers to fix errors in the game that arise due to the fact that it is launched from other devices.
As a result, the new model proposed by GeForceNow, did not find understanding among a number of developers and publishers. Activision Blizzard and Bethesda Softworks removed their games from the service a few weeks after its launch, limiting themselves to vague statements that they were allegedly not satisfied with the lack of revenue distribution from the games available on the service. Meanwhile, game director and creator of The Long Dark, Rafael van Leerop, removed his game from the service in March, annoyed that it was posted on GeForce Now without his explicit consent. (Two months later, van Leeroop relented, and The Long Dark was reinstated on GeForce Now after Nvidia switched to a prior consent scheme from developers, thereby allowing them full control over the appearance of their games on the platform.)
“The modern world is becoming everything for developersmore complex, with a lot of platform changes and the transition to streaming, so developers, as a way of doing business, need to be able to plan a strategy for how and where their games will appear, ”wrote van Leerop in a tweet in March.
Soon after Google launchedIn 2013, its line of streaming media devices Chromecast, the Chromecast development team began working on the ability to run games through these devices. At the same time, the Google Fiber development team was also prototyping a cloud gaming platform, exploring the possibilities offered by high-speed, low-latency communications. When these teams joined forces in 2014, they began working on what would become Google Stadia.
In October 2018, Google launched a closeda beta version of its developing cloud gaming service, which it calls Project Stream. It made it possible to run the Assassin's Creed Odyssey game in the Chrome browser. Project Stream gained popularity among residents of large cities with high connection speeds, and the enterprise as a whole looked promising at first.
When Google Stadia was announced onGame developer conferences in 2019, expectations were high. At least some gamers expected Google to actually announce the launch of a game console. Instead, another, albeit promising, streaming service was showcased, as well as a proprietary game controller, accompanied by plentiful rant from the stage about the technical wonders underlying the service.
“Stadia is the first major platformappeared in the industry somewhere over the past fifteen years, and today gamers have formed a lot of ideas, habits and ideas about how and where to play their games, - said Maid Bakar, vice president of development at Stadia. “So we were faced with the need to convince them that playing their favorite AAA-grade games is indeed possible on virtually any device.”
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Illustration: Richard. E. Chance for Polygon
When Google eventually launched Stadia in November2019, opinions on it were mixed. The service was praised for offering higher image quality than the rest of the competition and for providing a smooth transition in gaming between PCs and smartphones. However, the Stadia platform, like many of Google's services, lacked features at launch. The promised features were missing, such as wireless support for the Stadia controller and 4K resolution via a web browser. Doubts persisted about input lag, as well as concerns about Stadia's fragility, which would eventually take its place in the digital graveyard of other dead Google services such as Google Plus, Google Reader, and Google Express.
Google, for its part, convinced Polygon thatthat it will take time to create a service as ambitious as Stadia. As the service's first anniversary approaches, one of the biggest constraints on Stadia remains the small number of exclusive new products available on the platform. The company intends to solve this problem by developing games by its Stadia Games and Entertainment division, which is led by Jade Raymond, a Ubisoft studio veteran.
Meanwhile, after nearly a year of public beta testing, Microsoft launched its xCloud streaming service in mid-September. It is currently available for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. (Updated: Paragraph has been modified to clarify xCloud availability - Polygon's note).
“Music has already made a breakthrough, video has already made a breakthrough… I think now it’s the turn of gaming”
The xCloud service became the brainchild of Karim Chudry,Microsoft's corporate vice president of cloud gaming; and a 22-year veteran of the company who previously led the development of software for the Xbox. In early 2017, Choudhry began to discuss with core team members the possibility of creating a new service that builds on the three strengths of the corporation - content, community and the cloud - and enables high-quality console games streamed from the data center to be played on mobile devices. Microsoft Azure.
“If you told me five years ago that IWatching the entire Stranger Things season on my smartphone, I would have thought that your head is not all right, but now it's reality, ”Chudry says, referring to 5G technology as a potential catalyst that could make high-speed connections are more accessible and cheaper around the world. “And you know, the music has already made a leap, the video has made a leap, and in terms of consumer expectations, I think that now is the turn of gaming.”
It took a while to convincepublishers agree to host their games on the new Microsoft service. At that time, Chudry's team had yet to connect their xCloud hardware - modified Xbox One S consoles - to Azure data centers. Therefore, when Chudry and his team needed to make presentations to partners, often in hotel rooms, they took with them what they called a "cloud in a box" - an early prototype of equipment that was installed in the next room.
“One of my engineers was with"Cloud in a box" in the adjoining room, and at this time we were preparing to meet in our "suite" - recalled Chudry. "As soon as the presidents, creators and founders of various gaming companies appeared, we began the meeting by handing them a phone and tablet where their games were installed."
Much in the xCloud service that Microsoftoffers as part of an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription for $ 14.99 a month looks attractive. The service currently has an updated selection of over a hundred downloadable games for Windows PC and Xbox One, including Doom Eternal, Forza Horizon 4 and Halo 5: Guardian. And with the advent of xCloud, subscribers can stream the same games to their Android devices. This is a very attractive proposition, but the lack of (so far) support for iOS devices may disappoint some. It also looks odd that streaming is actually only possible for Android devices; gaming on a PC or Xbox still means downloading games.
Not even two weeks have passed sinceMicrosoft's announcement of the xCloud service, as Amazon announced the Luna service, which will be based on Amazon Web Services and will stream games at up to 1080p and 60 fps. (The company told Polygon that 4K support is "coming soon."
It is still unclear when the Luna service will becomeavailable to everyone, as Amazon is currently providing preview access by invitation only. However, the company intends to overtake competitors by offering a “starter plan” of $5.99 per month during the trial period, and gamers will have a selection of more than 100 games, including Resident Evil 7, Control, A Plague Tale: Innocence, The Surge 2 and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Although Luna is somewhat reminiscent of Stadia in its approach, Amazon prices content differently, by combining different game catalogs into “game channels” that differ in tariffs. The Luna+ channel costs $5.99 per month, but little is known about the Ubisoft channel, which promises access to full editions of some games with the ability to download add-ons.
A real test for all these services in thator another form will be the appearance in November of a new generation of game consoles. The next leap in graphical fidelity offered by next-gen games, and the desire to see games created for the PlayStation 5 Xbox Series X streamed over time on Sony and Microsoft services, will once again expand what is now considered possible in cloud gaming. Likewise, cloud services will need to offer exclusive options to gamers to turn the tide in their favor. Whether or not these new streaming options will push players towards cloud gaming is anyone's guess, though.
“This is just the case when everyone on their ownthe skin needs to make sure that the gameplay in the cloud is as good as on a local device, and at the same time it is much cheaper, '' former Gaikai executive Perry suggested. - Will cloud gaming then become the norm? After all, he is already on the way. Definitely on the way. "
Gratitude
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