14 DAY TRIAL // Gaming might soon be departing from home consoles or PCs to the cloud, at least according to German developer Crytek, the studio behind the massively successful Crysis series.
Cloud gaming is slowly getting off the ground, with two major services, OnLive and Gaikai, offering the ability to play games via an online infrastructure, where the game is actually running on a powerful PC in a data center, while the actual gameplay is being streamed to a web browser where the user can enjoy it.
While there have been on-going debates about such services, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli is pretty confident that this is the future, but only if games are going to be optimized for cloud gaming.
"Gaikai as well as OnLive, they're pioneers in that [area]. But I also think that [current cloud gaming solutions] can be dangerous in a way, from a business perspective," he told Gamasutra. "I have concerns about the way it's approached, but I think cloud gaming is the future, inevitably."
OnLive is definitely the more popular cloud gaming service, as it has an online store, while Gaikai is working behind the scenes, offering its infrastructure to game developers and publishers, who want to provide instant access to gameplay from a web browser.
Still, Yerli believes that such services won't become popular until games are optimized for cloud use, highlighting this example with Crysis 2, his studio's newest release.
"Crysis 2 isn't built to be scaled on a cloud. Crysis 2 is not a cloud game. Crysis 2 is a client-based game that is running on a cloud. And yes, it has the benefit of that scalability on the client side, but it is inefficient on the server side, because it's not meant to be on a cloud. Until this is overcome, and people build proper cloud games, this will always be a business issue," he said.
Even if games aren't yet optimized for cloud services like OnLive or Gaikai, users are becoming more accustomed to having their games streamed to them, like Netflix or Hulu does with movies or TV shows, so it's definitely worth keeping an eye on their development.