Newzoo predicts that the global mobile market will grow to $86.1 billion in revenue while online gamers worldwide will increase from 1.21 billion this year (2013) to 1.55 billion.
The growing online gaming market is the area of interest of the gaming industry in recent years. With many new casual gamers due to the popularity of smartphones as gaming devices, and the success of small studios in the mobile app stores, many start-ups are looking to enter the market.
One of the catalysts that can shape these companies’ success is to leverage on cloud computing, which offers games and app developers a great platform to build great games rapidly despite the challenges and constraints in the fast-growing industry.
Scalability for start-ups
Cloud computing is replacing traditional gaming standards while it creates solutions for app developers and entrepreneurs to scale up in a cloud environment.For robust games that require many servers, this also meant huge investment, which the typical tech start-up cannot afford. Server crashes and poor connections are quite common and inevitable in online games, indicating the uncertainty of traction from the gaming audience. We can conclude that gaming portals done in a traditional gaming setup is unreliable and expensive.
However, the use of cloud computing allows app developers and entrepreneurs to scale according to their needs from basic to advanced ones for app development and testing before distribution. Developers maximize the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) infrastructure to develop, test, deploy and manage apps that are delivered over the web.
Everybody plays online
The cloud can deliver a remarkable gaming experience with 3D or HD graphics and exceptional speed without interruption to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet. The scalability of game session hosted on a distributed cloud infrastructure to a large network of online gamers has more rooms for improvement. It’s plausible that everyone will become a gamer in the future as cloud development continues.Gaming websites such as GameTableOnline (GTO) uses cloud to expand the servers to host its multiplayer game tournaments. With cloud servers, anyone can setup their web, database, and games servers separately, allowing the game to perform top-shaped despite spiky traffic demand.
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| Image Credits: www.debugdesign.com |
This case is more for actual end hosting of game servers where gamers play on, and has nothing to do with development. Even if it’s about games, it’s out of context here.
Move it down to the next section and it may work, but it would still need rewrites.
MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) gaming is becoming popular nowadays alongside the explosive growth of mobile market, which is dominated by two mobile operating system: iOS and Android. The capability of smartphones and tablets to support MMOs increases the number of gamers participating worldwide.
This type of gaming requires a huge amount of resources that can only be facilitated using a cloud infrastructure. Such demand of MMO also requires complex software and uses multithreading that would best operate in a cloud environment.
The Future of Cloud Gaming
Cloud computing has opened up new venues for gamers to play online with streaming services. Companies like Microsoft and Sony are finding ways on how to move from multiplatform games toward real cross-platform experiences, especially with the growth of smartphones and tablets.Microsoft claimed that the integration of cloud computing into Xbox One would make it four times powerful than the traditional gaming console, while Sony promised a future integration of cloud to its new Play Station 4.
While it’s exciting to see another level of cloud gaming in the coming years, it’s still a challenge for the gaming industry to fully depend on cloud since there’s still a vague definition on what the cloud technology means for the industry itself and its function.
Andrew WoodAbout the Author:
Andrew Wood is a tech addict, who enjoys researching and writing about the latest technology.