Cloud Gaming Won’t Replace Handheld or Mobile Gaming Any Time Soon
The idea of playing the latest AAA video games streamed to your smartphone is an appealing one. Forget the Nintendo Switch or mobile apps, you can tap into the latest and greatest hardware! Unfortunately, there may be some caveats here.
Cloud gaming has come a long way. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Sony, and NVIDIA have built robust cloud gaming infrastructure. For people who live in the places cloud gaming services are offered, they’re becoming a viable alternative to buying a gaming console or an expensive gaming PC.
That is, as long as you meet all the requirements! Using a wired Ethernet connection to a high-speed fiber connection, you can get visuals and responsiveness that feel like playing on a local machine. At least as long as you don’t compare it side-by-side with a local gaming system.
However, many different stars have to align for cloud gaming to work well. The distance from your controller input to your screen output is now possibly hundreds of miles long. Along that path, there are many potential points of failure, and the entire journey from the controller to screen has to be completed in milliseconds to be playable.
Cloud gaming is a serious technical challenge, which means you don’t want to introduce more variables than you need to. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what you’re doing when switching to wireless data transmission.
Sending information using electromagnetic waves propagated through the air is a much more chaotic process than sending electrical impulses in an orderly fashion down a copper wire—or as pulses of light captured in a fiber optic strand.
Wireless transmissions are subject to numerous sources of interference from the ground, from space, from metal objects like cars moving around, or
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