Future of Gaming

The Future of Gaming

Introduction:

There are currently three architectures being used in modern games that consists of their

own drawbacks and trade-offs such as scalability and consistency. Cloud Gaming is a new

architecture being developed that aims to overcome the problems that exists in current

architectures; however, communication latency and bandwidth has always been its problems.[1]

Large name companies like Sony has already begun purchasing Cloud Gaming companies, such

as OnLive and Gaikai[2], which will only help push the architecture forward. By streaming the

gaming content from remote cloud servers, similar to streaming videos from YouTube, all the

games will be cross-platform and much cheaper for end-users as expensive hardware will no

longer be needed to enjoy the game at its full glory. Integrating techniques and ideas from the

cloud and gaming communities into the Cloud Gaming architecture will allow developers to

overcome the wall that have once blocked the architecture from moving forward.

Problem Description:

The three common gaming architectures being used today are Client/server, Peer-to-peer

and Hybrid. Client/server architecture suffers from the inability to handle growing workload,

poor fault tolerance and expensiveness.[3] Peer-to-peer suffers from inconsistency, exploits and

complexity in integration.[4] Hybrid architecture attempts to solve the drawbacks of the prior

architectures but does not handle them as well as the gaming community hopes for.[5] Cloud

gaming aims to improve on all of these aspects and is traditionally defined as having a single

cloud server do all the work and allow users to stream the content off of the same server.

Cloud gaming is developed with the conscience that video games require a good Qualityof-

experience (QOE), which includes the consideration of precision, responsiveness and fairness.

Precision is measured by the difference between the client and server states, for example, if the

client shoots a target three times the server should register the three shots fired accurately and in