With cloud gaming, you can play latest video games on every platform and you don’t have to limit your graphics settings, even with the worst graphic card and processor.
The only limit is your Internet connection. You don’t need to have Windows to play with the best games on a computer; games software are running on servers and you are only receiving images from the server. Whether cloud gaming is a good solution or not is not the question. The best solution would be to keep both cloud gaming and local gaming so you don’t depend on an Internet connection and you have the ability to patch games yourself.
With cloud gaming, I see a real opportunity for creating a Linux version of video games. Windows was a privileged platform for computer games because everybody has Windows. But now, with cloud gaming, we don’t care of the users operating system, it’s all about the OS running on games servers. There’s no doubt that currently, servers are running on Windows because cloud gaming companies have no choice: if they want to run a game on a computer, they will rarely found a Linux or Mac version.
Cloud gaming industry is constantly growing and it will certainly exceed local gaming. Gamers will always have to update their hardware, connected TV are everywhere, there will be a lot of good reasons to subscribe to a cloud gaming service.
Cloud gaming companies will have to buy new servers and it results more Windows licenses. What if developers will create a Linux version of their game? Web servers are almost all running on Linux, why not continue with cloud gaming servers? It could be beneficial for everybody: cloud gaming companies don’t need to depend on Windows, they will save a lot of money and games will go cross-platform for local gaming too, allowing Linux users to buy a Linux version so they can play the game without being connected to Internet.
Developers will spend more time porting a game for one more platform but an agreement with cloud gaming companies could be profitable. We could also see what OpenGL is really capable of and maybe realize after some updates that it can be as good as Microsoft proprietary DirectX.
Comments are welcome 🙂
Cloud gaming could be the next step in gaming, but the latency could be unbearable especially for people who live in countries that have slow internet connections or live far from the US. Not every country has uncapped/unlimited data plans so people will get worried that they would use up their data too soon because streaming that amount of data would be a lot. But it’s a good idea. If the internet infrastructure is upgraded in many countries this may become popular.