This video is brought to you by Wix. Get your free website on the link down bellow. There are coming for gaming PCs, everyone! super small clients connected to gaming PCs in a server somewhere are going to replace all consoles and desktops forever. Well, maybe not so much.
In a relatively short space of time, the story of Cloud Gaming has taken a very interesting turn. For those unfamiliar with the concept: as video compression technology and internet infrastructure improve there is this growing idea of changing the familiar model of running a game on a local powerful enough machine to running the game on a powerful server somewhere else https://coloradosfrontier.com/the-future-of-vr-and-games/? Compression a video feed of the game back to a smaller or weaker device through the web and relaying back the controller or keyboard inputs. It requires a fast internet connection but only a very modest local PC thus somewhat making the concepts of specs obsolete. This is not on itself a new idea, onlive tried this back in 2010 (it did not go well) and on its wake, a number of smaller niche services have tried different versions of this formula with different degrees of success and I did a video exploring a lot of them. In the meantime, there has been an interesting miniature explosion of mainstream interest in the concept. Google, a company known for launching all sorts of crazy experimental ideas as products and then seeing which ones stick around, did a brief experiment running on the Chrome browser. And there are rumors of them announcing their own streaming service/console on GDC. I am attending GDC and publishing this video right before I leave so I plan to keep an eye on this. If that happens and you want to know my opinion, Twitter, Instagram or the community tab is the place to keep an eye on. Nintendo currently allows playing some games that are too heavy for the switch using cloud computers in Japan. Sony has a service to play a very specific selection of PS4 games on a very specific group of countries which funnily enough is based on OnLive technology which they purchased. But the more interesting recent development comes from the hand of a company that has a very large influence both in computing and gaming as a whole: Microsoft. For the last generation, it is more noticeable how Microsoft is moving away from the classic strategy of creating the best console possible and getting people in with exclusives and is more and more using the Xbox brand more as a service rather than a device. Xbox exclusives keep showing up on PC as the dreaded Universal Windows Apps, with some major exceptions and there seem to be growing experiments of basically of running basically the same game in both places. However, the big surprise is on Xcloud. As its console presence loses priority Microsoft has been pouring resources into what essentially is their own gaming platform where the interface for playing could be a phone, a tablet, or a small TV box and all games are run on remote servers. The language Microsoft is using for this is pretty ambitious. It is not a surprise that when news started breaking of Microsoft working to bring Xbox games to switch the rumours point out to xCloud being a part of it. So it is not crazy to think that at least one of the big names in gaming is seriously considering a future where console gamers in countries with decent internet infrastructure buy a tiny box to connect to their TVs that streams games over an Xbox subscription. The implications of this hypothetical future are interesting for all gamers and definitely for those limited by the low power of their local PCs so naturally, I got curious. Lucky for me a French cloud gaming company called Shadow released the new version of their gaming box called the Ghost, a light client that connects to their Cloud Gaming PC. There is no current information on the xCloud service, but it is fair to assume that it will be closer to Geforce Now in the sense that you would have a selection of compatible games to play. Shadow takes the approach of services like Parsec in the sense that you are basically renting a PC, the whole thing. Their primarily use case is installing Steam, Origin or whatever and gaming there, after all the PC that you rent seems very, very capable. The ghost is a very interesting device for several reasons. About 2 years ago Shadow´s initial pitch centred entirely around their original Shadow Box, a device you would rent from them that aimed to replace a gaming PC entirely but they then pivoted to offering Shadow as a service that you could use in your current PC or even your phone.
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