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Five reasons cloud-based gaming is the future

23rd August 2020 Print

Many years from now, you're going to tell your grandchildren that you used to have to go down to a store and hand over physical cash if you wanted to buy a brand-new video game. They'll look at you and laugh in total disbelief. The idea will be as absurd to them as the idea of a pre-internet world seems to children today. The march of technology cannot be stopped, and once it's started to head in a certain direction, it's impossible to get in its way. Right now, when it comes to gaming, the direction it's headed in is the cloud. 

There are numerous reasons why cloud gaming is a better bet for the future than buying games and playing them on your own console or computer, and we're going to cover five of the best ones in this article. Before we do that, though, we should give credit to the people who came up with the idea of cloud gaming. You may not know this, but the idea originated with the online slots and casino industry. They were the first branch of the gaming industry to take games and place them wholly online, with no storage or processing demand placed on the device used to access them. When you play Online Slots UK, the reels spin in cyberspace, not on the hard disc or processor of your device. Everyone else has been playing catch up with that concept ever since, while in the meantime, online slots have started to evolve into mobile slots. If you want to keep track of online innovation in the gaming industry, always look at what the casinos are doing first!

Now we’ve livened your day up with that piece of trivia, allow us to explain why cloud gaming is the future with five solid pieces of reasoning. 

It Requires No Storage

We admit that this is a bigger problem for consoles than it is for PCs, but it’s still an issue. The video games of today are not the humble creations of yesteryear that took up only a few megabytes of storage on your hard drive. They’re colossal files, and they get bigger over time because of updates, patches, and downloadable content. Many a PlayStation owner knows the pain of having to delete an old game to make room for the installation of a new one on the PS4, and the storage capacity of the forthcoming PS5 is already being questioned by angry gamers. This isn’t a problem when your game is stored on a remote server in the cloud. There’s no storage burden whatsoever placed on your device. This is a double win as far as your PC is concerned, because the fewer files there are stored on it, the faster it will run.

There’s No Processor Demand

The storage issues are a bigger problem for consoles than PCs. The processor issue is a bigger problem for PCs than consoles. You can always rest assured that so long as your console is current-gen, it will cope just fine with any new game you want to play on it. You can't say the same about PCs. As your laptop gets older, it becomes slower when compared to newer models with better tech inside them. Games will evolve to meet the standards of this newer tech. That means eventually, your CPU won't be able to cope with the demand placed on it by cutting edge games. You can get around this by buying a specialist gaming PC, but gaming PCs are incredibly expensive. Even if you do that, your gaming PC will eventually become obsolete. Streaming games through the cloud, on the other hand, doesn’t require anything other than a serviceable internet connection. So long as your PC can provide one, it doesn’t matter whether it was built last week or ten years ago. The processor won’t even work up a sweat. 

The Games Are Cheaper

We might be getting ahead of ourselves with this statement, but we'll go with it for now. When a games developer makes a game available for sale, they rack up packaging and shipping costs when they send their games out to stores or directly to you at home. Every disc, plastic pack, and manual or card costs money to produce. Multiply those costs by a few million units, and suddenly it's a massive expense. That cost is passed on to you as the buyer. We call these costs 'overheads.' Cloud games don't have any such overheads, because they don't physically exist. They're not delivered to you. They're not sent to the shop. There is no packaging to produce, and there are no shipping costs to cover. That means there's no longer a cost to pass on to you, and buying the game is therefore cheaper. That doesn't mean that sneaky game devs won't push their prices up in the future, but this statement is true in the here and now. 

The Hardware Is Cheaper

Here's a thought: If you're playing games through the cloud, why do you need to buy a console at all? Answer: you don't. If cloud gaming catches on as an idea, there's every chance that consoles will become obsolete. 5G connections are fast and reliable, so there shouldn't be an issue with lag or buffering. Remote servers store all the game data and do all the processing for you. All you need to have in front of you is a controller, and a device with a screen to play on. That can be a smart TV. It could even be your laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone. What is a console other than a box for loading and processing high-performance games? The technology is no longer required, which means that soon there will be no reason to spend $500 or more on buying it. Your only expenses will be your controller, your internet bandwidth, and the games you buy. The PS5 and the Xbox Series X might be the last of their kind. 

It’s More Convenient

Let's face it; gaming is a little static as an activity. You have to be in front of your device when you want to play, which generally means being at home. What if you have an hour to kill at work, and you're bored? What if you're away in a hotel for the weekend, or you're outside of your home for another reason? Unless you've packed your computer or console and taken it with you, you're in a jam - unless, that is, you're a cloud gamer. If you're a cloud gamer, you just take out your phone and your controller and login to your preferred game, picking right back up from where you left off at home. You can play your favorite games wherever you are and whenever you like so long as there's a strong internet connection available - and as we said before, 5G will solve that problem for all of us. 

Buy next-gen consoles if you want to, and enjoy the games you play on them all you like. Appreciate them for what they are while you're doing it, though, because based on the progress cloud gaming is making, they're the end of an era.