The title of this blog post might be the most click-bait-y one I’ve ever written.
My friends know I’m old-fashioned, and don’t like where trends in general have gone in my industry. I don’t like “software-as-a-service,” where a user has to pay a monthly subscription regardless to how frequently the thing was used that month, forcing updates when the user least wants it, and creating a never-ending job of growing complexity to the developer. I don’t like my things being put in the “cloud” to access anywhere, where anyone could access it anywhere, and where there isn’t a tangible, single place where it’s stored and secure.
But I admit “cloud-gaming” is most certainly the future, and that it has benefits. I think it’ll take over, not because of those benefits, but because of the way games are today.
For one thing, 2020 has forced game conventions to think differently. Normally, people would walk around crowded venue halls, looking at televisions showing the latest demos and trailers, and a player could stop at one, getting in line to try it. Compared to similar outlets (think “artist-ally” galleries and storefronts, or autograph tables, or speaker rooms), this never seemed like the fun thing to do, even for game enthusiasts. Games are mostly a single-player experience after-all, and require sitting down to concentrate on the experience for 10-15 minutes; why do that in a crowded hall of other people watching you?
One alternative is to make the demos available to try at home during the event’s timeline. Many conventions have implemented “attend-from-home” versions last year out of necessity, utilizing “Google Stadia” to deliver those demos on a consistent, low-barrier-of-entry platform. Sure, internet access still isn’t as universal as it should be, but increasingly, high-speed Fibre-internet is available, and other alternatives for small communities exist to deliver the minimum speeds needed for cloud-gaming to work. Stadia might have been the laughing-stock of the industry when it was first announced, but for this one purpose, it works great. It’s a literal game-changer.
And I think it will be increasingly important to play games on any device through the internet-connected-cloud, because of how poor the attempt has been to make “playing from local” viable. Consider the PS4 and Xbox One generation: for the first time, physical discs were just a delivery mechanism to install your game on your console’s hard drive, rather than playing directly off the disc. We went from games that required less than 10 MB (solely for save files) to more than 10 GB (effectively the entire game), to improve loading times. It’s exactly what you’d get if you were to buy the game digitally, and the physical disc and case seem to be purely for collecting purposes now.
Those game files have only gotten larger. At the dawn of the new PS5 and Xbox Series (?) generation, it’s becoming increasingly common for games to take up well over 150 GB on a hard drive (see the latest “Call of Duty” game), to store ultra-high resolution textures and uncompressed audio, among other things. And expensive SSD’s simply MUST be used to get the highest runtime speeds. We’re still at a point where a 1 TB SSD is considered high-capacity, but that could only store 5-6 AAA-level games now, compared to over 100 AAA-games from a couple generations ago (and I’d challenge anyone to be able to recognize a tangible difference between them justifying the increase in size). Over the next year, this is going to become a huge issue, in a way that still isn’t really being covered today.
Using discs as a delivery mechanism is also no longer relevant. When popping in a game for the first time, you’ll be forced to download day-one updates, sometimes as large as the full game itself, failing to save you any data on your internet plan. The game on the disc might be outright broken (looking at you, “Cyberpunk 2077”), because development teams just expect the day-one patch as a required thing, opposed to quality checks before sending data to press on the disc. So both storage and download issues are unavoidable, and considered to be simply standard to the industry now.
Beyond that is the issue of game compatibility and power. Modern PC’s are generally able to play older games, one way or another, but there are always exceptions. Certain console generations are still not really possible to access without the long-discontinued console in your home. Cloud gaming can seamlessly give access to multiple systems to give a player the best compatibility. And we’re stuck in that “new-generation-transition” where games will try to work on older systems while taking advantage of new ones, at a time when upgrading your PC is difficult (why scalping is still legal, I’ll never know… suggested retail prices exist for a reason, don’t they?), and at a time when less than 60 FPS or sub-4K resolutions are unacceptable for many spoiled players, even on older machines. It would be easier for developers to not only assume that the player has access to the same system they do, but to have access to the best-possible system available today. Cloud-gaming servers can be updated throughout the years in the backend, and the player would never have to worry about any of this.
Games also don’t quite have the accessible channels that other mediums do. You can read books for free from your local library. You can see expensive paintings in a gallery. Movies can be seen in a theater, or enjoyed in bulk at your favorite film festival. You can watch television over free antennae signals, or a cheap Netflix subscription. You can listen to all the music with a Spotify-subscription, or for free on the radio. Most art has both cheap and expensive methods to enjoy them, but games are different. Games have expensive barriers of entry, and have failed to develop a proper subscription-style service with wide access to a library. This makes it difficult to experiment and find new things; a subscription model would be very beneficial to indie developers. Cloud-gaming, if paired with a company’s library and subscription plan, could fix all of that.
Clearly, cloud-gaming is the way things are going, both out of convenience and out of necessity for all the issues the industry currently faces… that doesn’t mean I like it.
The Nintendo Switch still bucks the trend, storing games on physical cartridges (to date, I think all of Nintendo’s consoles have used a physical disc or cartridge to load the game). This allows it to get away with a measly 32 GB of cheap hard drive space. And I absolutely love it: I love having a genuine reason to collect physical games. As simple as this seems, I think this is a huge reason to the console’s popularity against its more powerful competitors. Children, parents, families and gamers understand how it works, and it just works, exactly as expected. Sure, loading times are worse, but not enough to stop anyone from enjoying their game.
Close developer friends know how often I’ve lamented the non-existence of an open-source, affordable, portable console, like an x86 Ouya-Portable, or a Linux-based 6″ gaming PC. Something with a full-size SD card slot as an option, to allow developers to put games of any size (pending cost) on a standard cartridge-like format. It could inspire low-level gaming again, games that can take less than 8 GB of space and run well on smaller hardware. Even cheap hardware today can easily run most AAA games from 10 years ago… what part of the modern gameplay experience really requires raytracing or 4K resolution? It would encourage and celebrate smaller indie developers, and should they not take to it… just play all the great games in your Steam library you haven’t gotten to yet! There are several China-made portable gaming-PC’s with exactly this in mind, but none quite finding the right balance of form-factor or price (and all assuming an exclusively digital-only distribution for your games, the way most PC games have been acquired since 2008), and not catching on with a larger general audience. Maybe Valve could step in for a Steam-console again. Or Soulja Boy.
Such a thing will probably never catch on though, since “can it play the latest Call of Duty” can make it automatically disqualified from most gamers’ minds, even if it can play the dozens of franchise entries that came before (and again, I challenge you to play an older “Duty” game and tell me the differences to the latest one). Gamers are spoiled, and developers are greedy with the specs and space required to run their projects. The industry won’t go the way I want things to go, for I’m just one, old-fashioned outlier. But things won’t work the way they are now for much longer: cloud-gaming, and possibly required subscription fees to access the latest games, will become the new normal within the next generation.
