From OnLive to Google Stadia, the evolution of cloud gaming in the video game industry has been far from cloudless
In the summer of 2011, Robert Stevenson and Tim Wilson of Gaikai, a cloud gaming company based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., Boarded a plane to arrive at Samsung Digital City in Suwon, South Korea, more than 13 hours later. They were going to launch playable demos of several games, including Mass Effect, from a server in California from over 9,300 kilometers away, thereby impressing the nearly four dozen Samsung employees and executives gathered in the conference room. It took some miracles of ingenuity to achieve smooth video playback at Samsung's secure headquarters, also considering that the hall was isolated from the Internet for security reasons, thus making seamless network access problematic. I had to improvise:
“It’s possible to prepare a presentation very carefully, but it cannot be foreseen,” recalls Stephenson, 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 helped secure 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 a 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 darling for Sony, which acquired it in June 2012 for $ 380 million . The startup's core streaming technology is at the core of PlayStation Now .
In May 2020, Sony announced that PlayStation Now has 2.2 million subscribers, but that number pales in comparison to the 130 million monthly active PlayStation Network users and the 106+ million PlayStation 4 consoles sold to date. The PlayStation Now subscriber base reflects the shared harsh reality of cloud gaming.
The slightest packet loss can completely spoil the signal
Over the past 15 years, many cloud gaming services such as OnLive and GameFly have emerged and disappeared, luring 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 andLuna , recently announced by Amazon , and designed to make a difference, the battle for universal acceptance, especially amid intense competition, could be as tough as ever.
"In cloud gaming, the biggest challenge is that the gameplay needs to be the same as usual, without having to buy a game console," said Michael Packter, Managing Director of Wedbush Securities, 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 is known today goes back to March 2009, when Steve Perlman announced OnLive at the Game Developers Conference. Inspired by the latest technological developments, including improved data and video compression, and the ever-increasing proliferation of smartphones, Pearlman came to the conclusion 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 perfectly photorealistic video footage in games prompted me to make a decision: we will develop it."
By 2009, Perlman had an impressive reputation in Silicon Valley. He helped create multimedia software that would become QuickTime, and also created WebTV, which sold the technology to Microsoft in 1997 for $ 425 million. However, he was practically unknown to the closely-knit gaming community, and he still had to establish himself in the eyes of developers and gamers.
“I think it was difficult for Steve to navigate the industry, because it 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?
He certainly did his best by running expensive marketing campaigns, renting large booths at the Game Developers' Conference and E3, and exerting intense pressure on the Palo Alto, Calif. Company to get their hands on their games for the OnLive platform. While game publishers such as Ubisoft, 2K Games, and THQ helped create an initial catalog of about a dozen games for OnLive by the time the platform launched (and grew to over 100 in a year), the rollout of other AAA games to OnLive has proven challenging. ... Many other publishers, accustomed to paying full price for games right away, were wary of the Netflix-like OnLive model of operation, and the prospects for this for the industry if the startup became popular.
Publishers were more sympathetic to Gaikai, a cloud-based gaming service run by David Perry, an established industry veteran who created games such as 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 was not a 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 launched on June 17, 2010, and on the same day Gaikai announced a long-term deal 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 quite upset when 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, every time I left after a meeting at a company office, an OnLive representative was already sitting in the lobby, who was received after me. In other words, we met the same people, ”Perry recalls. "It was pretty intense, it was real competition, but it was also an incentive for us."
Gaikai has never released their subscriber numbers for 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 approached OnLive with a proposal to acquire a startup. The tech giant even provided OnLive with a short-term loan of $ 15 million, which at the time was $ 5 million in monthly expenses, with approximately 20% of that amount going to pay for servers, and the remainder mostly to salaries for about two hundred employees. But in July 2012, Hewlett-Packard pulled out of the deal without much of an explanation and left Pearlman and OnLive in limbo to repay the $ 15 million loan and look for a new buyer. A month later, Pearlman found such a buyer in the person of Gary Loder, managing director of venture capital firm Lauder Partners. He acquired the assets of OnLive in August 2012 through the newly formed company OL2, paying $ 4.8 million for them - less than 1% of the $ 1.1 billion that OnLive had valued two years earlier.
"Cloud gaming has come to be seen as a disaster of sorts."
Although OnLive initially stated that Pearlman would remain as CEO, he left the company that month 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 time 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 to shut it down four weeks later, while Gaikai has become 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 accomplished 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 that in a very short time during the Great Recession managed to outstrip all 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 acquired us, then of course we would have worked on for as long as we want.”
Despite the failure of OnLive, attempts to launch cloud gaming have continued. 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 began testing a 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 there was no need to open another limited game store, especially since most of them already had Steam, Epic and Uplay accounts for the games they bought,” said 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 from beta status in February 2020, more than 4 million people have subscribed to the service, and the volume of monthly streaming is 15 million hours. However, the unusual 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 offered by GeForce Now did not find understanding among a number of developers and publishers. Activision Blizzar d and Bethesda Softworks removed their games from the service a few weeks after its launch, confining themselves to vague statementsabout the fact that they are allegedly not satisfied with the lack of distribution of income 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 complete control over the appearance of their games on the platform.)
“The modern world is becoming more complex for developers, with many changes in platforms and the transition to streaming, so developers, as a way to do business, need to be able to plan a strategy for how and where their games will appear,” wrote van Leerop in his tweet. in March.
Soon after Google launched its line of streaming media devices called Chromecast in 2013, the Chromecast development team began working on the ability to play 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 closed beta version of its upcoming cloud gaming service, which it dubbed 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 at the 2019 Game Developers Conference , 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 platform to hit the industry in some fifteen years or so, and gamers today have a lot of ideas, habits, and ideas about how and where to play their games,” said Stadia's VP of Engineering Maid Bakar. “Therefore, we faced the need to convince them that playing their favorite AAA-level games is indeed possible on almost any device.”
When Google eventually launched Stadia in November 2019 , 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, was lacking in 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 the fragility of Stadia, doomed over time to 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 that it would take time to build an ambitious service like 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 veteran of the Ubisoft studio.
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. ( Update : Paragraph has been modified to clarify xCloud availability - Polygon editors' note ).
"The music has already made a leap, the video has already made a leap ... I think now is the turn of gaming."
XCloud is the brainchild of Karim Chudhry, Microsoft's corporate vice president of cloud gaming and a 22-year veteran who previously led Xbox software development. In early 2017, Chudry began to discuss with core team members the possibility of creating a new service that would build on the three strengths of the corporation - content, community and the cloud - and enable 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 I would watch 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 on 5G technology as a potential catalyst that could make high-speed connections 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 convince publishers to agree to host their games on Microsoft's new 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 the“ cloud in a box ”in an adjoining room, while we were preparing to meet in our“ suite, ”Chudry recalled. "As soon as the presidents, creators and founders of various gaming companies appeared, we started the meeting by handing them a phone and a tablet where their games were installed."
Much of the xCloud service that Microsoft offers with its $ 14.99 / month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription looks appealing. 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 very strange that streaming is actually only possible for Android devices; gaming on a PC or Xbox still means downloading games.
Less than two weeks after Microsoft announced the xCloud service, Amazon announced the Luna service , which will be based on Amazon Web Services and will provide game streaming at resolutions up to 1080p and up to 60 fps . (The company told Polygon that 4K support is "coming soon."
It is not yet clear when Luna will become available to everyone, as Amazon is currently providing pre-access by invitation only. However, the company intends to overtake the competition by offering a $ 5.99 per month “starter plan” as part of a trial period, and a selection of over 100 games for gamers, including Resident Evil 7, Control, A Plague Tale: Innocence, The Surge 2 and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. While Luna is somewhat reminiscent of Stadia in its approach, Amazon's content pricing is different, by combining different game catalogs into “game channels” with differing rates. The Luna + Channel costs $ 5.99 a month, but little is known about the Ubisoft Channel, which promises access to full editions of select games with downloadable add-ons.
The real test for all these services in one form or another 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 the scope of what is now considered possible in cloud gaming. Likewise, cloud services will need to offer gamers exclusive options to turn the tide in their favor. Whether or not these new streaming capabilities will push players towards cloud gaming is anyone's guess, though.
"This is exactly the case when everyone has to make sure that the gameplay in the cloud is as good as on the local device, and at the same time it is much cheaper," said former Gaikai executive Perry. - Will cloud gaming then become the norm? After all, he is already on the way. Definitely on the way. "
