What exactly is cloud gaming?

Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm the an editor here at how stuff works dot Com, and sitting next to me, as usual at the text Stuff News desk is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. No, we're not talking about networking today. Well, we are kind of kind of Yeah, I guess we can't get away from that no matter what. Huh. No, sadly, but we are

here to talk about gaming. Yes, gaming, something I am passionate about, despite the fact that I don't own any well, I own a Wee that's the only current generation console I don't need to know. Yeah, however, I'd like to share anyway, we are talking about networks and gaming. We did those go together again? Well, of course, networks and gaming aren't new. We've been networking and gaming for years

and years now. But what we wanted to talk about was a new kind of networked gaming where the network is doing all the the the number crunching and graphics processing and all that kind of stuff on its end, and so you just need a very thin client to access those games. So again, this is taking us back to one of our favorite topics here at Tech Stuff, that would be cloud computing. This is my wireless router. There are many like it, but this nice, nice full

metal jacket reference because I'm not mistaken. Um, this is my router. This is my gun. Okay, So uh, first, before we get it too far into this, UM, I wanted to kind of talk about reasons why some of us are a little skeptical about the whole cloud gaming thing. And um, it's because in recent years we've seen some companies, UM One in particular, does really make a claim about an upcoming console that it wasn't so much a cloud computing console, but was a console promising these these really

big big results, and um and nothing ever came of it. Why, Jonathan, I don't know what you could mean. I could mean, the Phantom Game Console, one of the most aptly named consoles ever to come out of anyone's imagination. Yeah. Honestly, when you're when you're thinking about the Phantom Console and how it never appeared, you would think, wait a minute, did they know they were going to put one over on me? Yeah, with a name like that, you're thinking they did that on purpose, So at least I am.

The Phantom Game Console was an idea that out of a company called Infinium Labs, and the basic concept behind the console was that you would have a console that was always hooked up to the the Internet, uh through a high speed internet connection to broadband connection, and you would download games from the Internet onto this console and it would have all the software on the console necessary to play games that were meant for PCs for other game consoles I think they mentioned like the PS two

and the Xbox and all the Nintendo games. So it was kind of this pie in the sky unified game console where you could suddenly have access to all these different games using one machine, which is kind of the thing that a lot of gamers have wanted for a really long time because despite the fact that you have fan boys of every single gaming device out there, who will claim to their to their grave that their favorite

console is the best one. Ultimately, every single one of those fan boys has a game that he or she I guess I could put fan girls in there too. UH wants to really play, but it's on another console like E T for the that Why are you trying to trying to derail me? No one wants to play ET for the twenty. If you do want to play ET for the talk to me, because I might have a copy somewhere, you know. I'm I'm very sorry that those of you listening can't see the vein that throbs

for that game. I want a horrible game. No, no, no, I'm talking about Okay, So let's say that I'm an Xbox owner and I really want to access Oh gosh, what's a good PS two game or PS three game that's that's only for that system. UM. I was gonna say Grand Theft Auto, but that change to Uh, I might say Ratchet and Clink. Okay, Ratchet and Clink. All right. Let's say let's say that there's a game that's specifically

for one console you own the other one. You would have to go out and either buy or rent the other console before you could play that game, which big bummer. So the Phantom Game Console was promising, Hey, you're gonna be able to play any game you want on this one system, very very uh kind of enticing idea. Um, there's a little problem. Oh yeah, there was no evidence that the thing actually existed. There were some pictures, but

the pictures weren't really conclusive. Uh. Some people did some investigating and found that the address for the company led to like a little empty office building or I guess it was actually an empty office in a strip mall. And then it was I think it was like a hundred square feet with um, a desk and two phones, and that wasn't So people were immediately skeptical of this and a lot of people were calling shenanigans and I believe it was seconded so they got the brooms out.

Um that's a reference for the South Park fans out there. So anyway, it did turn out that the the Infinium Labs eventually kind of backed away from this whole game console thing. They do have a product out now, Um it's a keyboard, and they they change their name, yes, And they apparently lost about sixty two point seven million dollars between two thousand two and two thousand five. Yeah, I'm betting that's not on that hundred square foot office space.

Probably not so. At any rate, there were a lot of charges of fraud and stuff being bandied about during that whole time, so that has understandably made people a little skeptical about other gaming systems that aren't coming from

one of the big names. Um that you know, most people think like, okay, either it's not gonna make an impact at all, uh, it doesn't really exist, or um, you know the guys crazy you know, Yeah, I mean it's you know, You've got your your sagas and Nintendo's and Atari's and people who you know have the wherewithal and expertise doing this stuff. And then somebody else, like

say Microsoft, wants to join in. You go, well, okay, sure they can throw hundreds of millions of dollars at doing this, so okay, ye, I'll believe that they're doing that. But you know, Joe comes up and say, yeah, I've started Joe's games. I'll have a console out next year. You're going, hey, okay, I'm sorry, who are you again? Right, But in this case, we're talking about someone who actually is well known who has come out with this, uh,

this new proposed gaming system. And we should add that the one we're about to talk about is not necessarily the only cloud gaming system in development right now. It's just the one that's made the biggest splash as of the recording of this podcast. Yeah, it's made quite a few recent headlines, right and we're talking about the on Live system, which was unveiled at the Game Developers Conference

in San Francisco in March two thousand nine. And this is sort of the brainchild of Steve Pearlman, who you may know from such wonderful uh projects as web TV and quick Time. So so not a non unknown no, not not in the least his uh. His company reared in UM I believe a reference to uh Atlas Shrugged, Yes, got Old and rand Um and if if one thing can make me matter than e T for the ay

it's an rand all right then let um. Yeah, it's At one point the company was named Reard and Steele and uh that was about the time that the Maxi Digital video recorder was part of the company and is now spun off. It is part of Digio. UM but you know, these are these are some serious projects. This is not an unknown quantity in the least and by night operation. And if you look at the console, it's very very simple. Actually it's not even tiny, not even

necessarily a console. It depends on which version you're looking at. A micro console. Yeah, um, and that's again just one version of it. So here's the thing, uh, he introduced on Live UM at the Game Developers Conference UH and said that it's been in development for UM for for seven years. So there are three different versions of this thing. There's one that connects to your television. Then there is a software that you would have on your PC or software you would have on your Mac. Thank you. So

for once, Mac users are not left out of the game. However, I should point out only for max that have Intel processors. Well, it's for all intents and purposes, the modern map, right, If you don't if you own it, if you own an old, old Mac, then you may not be able to run this well work on my power book. Yeah, you're gonna need an Intel based Mac running a current version of the operating system. But otherwise you can run

this software on a PC or a Mac. And for the TV because you can't run software on a TV. Yet they have this little mini console. Yeah, it looks about the size of a like an iPhone really, I mean it's tiny. Well, it doesn't have any of the parts that you would associate with a traditional console, with traditional the modern console, so it's not It doesn't have a hard on it. It doesn't have any moving parts. Well I don't think there are any moving parts. It

doesn't have a hard doesn't have a disc player in it. Uh, so you know you're not gonna be looking at a Blu ray player. But then again, it's supposed to be a lot cheaper, although they haven't really announced a lot of pricing for the thing yet. Right so, right now, it's got what what it does have the console that is it um it has support for up to four wireless controllers, Bluetooth, Bluetooth support for four headsets. Um it has two USB ports for physical connections to a controller,

a keyboard or mouse or whatever. Um It's got U an S optical output Ethernet port. That's of course, where you would plug it up to your high speed Internet UH connection, because like the Phantom, this requires an Internet connection UH as a video audio outport, and a micro USB power port. That's it. That's that, this little bitty box, that's all it has on it. And then you if you plug all that up and you hook it up to your TV, you got hooked up to your internet

broadband service. Uh. Theoretically, you would then have access to all the games that are on its system, and you would purchase games the way you normally would accept. Of course, you wouldn't own a physical copy of the game. You would essentially own Yeah, you would own access to the game really because you wouldn't have They wouldn't send you any files. They wouldn't send you a CD or anything.

You would log into the system and you would access the game that exists on these servers in the cloud, and then you could play the game through that. And all the graphics processing, all of the number crunching, all of that goes on in the cloud. So it doesn't matter how powerful a machine you have. If you have a PC or a MAC that meets the minimum specifications, which are really low, really minimal. I mean, if you have just an old Windows machine that's running Windows XP,

you can use this. You don't supporting to on live. You don't even have to, sorry, you don't even have to have the latest Apple operating system. I believe it runs on ten point four and and maybe even ten point three. It does run on ten point three, so I mean, we're not these are operating systems that are several years old. Yes, So it's it's you know, it doesn't have to have bleeding edge hardware for it to work. And for for a lot of gamers, this is, um

this is kind of a dream come true. I mean, I don't know about you, Chris, but I was a big computer gamer when during the eighties and early nineties. Okay, I really loved computer games. But right around the time of the early nineties, that's when games started coming out that required um uh a more um powerful video processor. Right, so it started to feel like if you didn't go out and buy a new video card every six months or so, you couldn't play the latest games. And video

cards cost around two hundred bucks. So you're talking about Okay, I'm going to spend two d sixty dollars to play the sixty dollar game, because before I can play it, I have to get a new video card. I was not willing to do that. I that is the point where I dropped out of playing computer games. So for the last fifteen years or so, I haven't really been playing computer games that often, at least not ones that

required a you know, high powered video card. So I switched back to consoles, and a lot of people did because console you know, you knew it was good for a few years. Then you didn't have to worry about upgrades and things like the the Xbox that we the PS two and three, you can connect us to the

network and actually get patches through the network. So if even in that case, you know your your machine is getting upgraded, but you don't have to buy new components for it to make it so, so that stays in working condition. Right, So this thing with theoretically pull that out completely because it doesn't. All it does is function as a you know, I go between a proxy between you and the cloud. It doesn't have to be updated and at least, you know, maybe a little firmware every

once in a wheah. It's all. It's all updated on the back end, like to say, and occasionally might get a patch to whatever the software you're running on your machine to in order to access this. I assume it's something like a browser. Um, the thing is this has This is right now, it's in internal beta. It's supposed to go to a wider beta this summer, and then according to on Live, it should be ready for for consumers by winner of two thousand nine, which I'm really

excited about. I mean, the idea of being able to play this on my television or on a computer. I really like this idea. And and it supports networked games, so you can play with or against other people online. Uh. You know, all of this sounds great. They've got some

great partners. They've got e A Games, Ubisoft, Take Two, Interactive, um Boy, Leaders of World of Google, Atari th h Q, which by the way produced one of my favorite pro wrestling video games of all time, WrestleMania two thousand and uh for the sixty four and Um that's not that I'm biased. Those were awesome video games. Okay. Anyone who ever played any of those old in sixty four wrestling

games will agree with me anyway. So they have these great partners there, and more will will surely join them. Because think about this, guys. When you build a video game, the expense of building it isn't just in the development, it's in the production. I mean, you have to produce boxes. You have to produce you know, whatever media you're going to you know, encode the game on, whether it's a cartridge and disc whatever, to pay for distribution. You have

to pay for distribution. Yet, yeah, exactly, there are all these things you have to pay for. There's extra marketing costs. This cuts out a lot of those considerations. So now developers now they're like, well, this is great because now we won't have to pay for all this this production.

We can get a larger return our investment. I wouldn't necessarily expect this to make video games cheaper, because if the market is going to bear a fifty dollar or sixty dollar video game, there's no reason for them to charge less. That's true, although they may do what some of the other digital distribution markets have done in trim the price a little bit. Uh, you know, because there is still the matter of having to pay the developers. Developers, developers,

um and um. You know, there are there are a lot of other costs overhead. You know, if you've got a lot of people in one building developing, they require a lot of mountain dew. Um, So there tabin mountain dew and Frito's. Uh so. Um, so you know there are some serious costs that that do have to be taking care of, and of course then there's that whole profit motive. Um, but you know they might trim that.

There is one neat advantage though, that this will have that other game consoles don't unless of course, you're you know, going to rent the video games, and that is that they're going to let you try this out on the website. It actually says, hey, you'll be able to try some of these out and if you like to keep going with that, you could purchase the game. Yeah, which is which is great because you know, other than renting, until renting became popular, and that was that was a real

pain in the neck. You found you spent fiftys in a game and went, man, this thing is junk right. And there are a couple of other really cool things for developers too, if you think about it. For one, um, you don't have to worry about resale. That's a big thorn and computer game company sides right now is the fact that people get tired of games, they can go and trade them in for other games, and then those those old games can be sold again. While the game

company doesn't see any of that money. You know, they would rather sell a new game every single time. Well, if it's all you know, you're accessing, If you're buying access to a game, you can't resale, resale, resell that resale. Sorry, I am from the South and occasionally looks through, um and uh, you know it's the other nice thing is

that you only developed for one platform. You know, you don't have to develop for the If you have a game and you want to make it available to every single console, that means you have to go through the development process us well essentially three times if we're talking about the three major consoles right right, that costs money exactly, and that costs That costs money, and it takes time and uh, you know you think about it, that divides

your resources by three or four amounts. You know. This way, you're developing for one platform. Anyone who's using a PC, Mac or television can access it. I mean there, that's almost a no brainer. Plus you might be able to uh go back and release older titles and continue to you know, long tail it stuff over. Yeah, you might even be able to find I mean our partner maybe they'll release e t now why do you do this

to me? There's um, there are some problems. The biggest problem is that if you do not have a reliable internet broadband connection, you could experience what is called latency. Yes, that's when you Latency is very bad. That's when you try and do something in the game, and then a second or two later, your character's movement reflect what you just did. So, like you pressed the jump button and then when one Mississippi to Mississippi Mario jumps. That's not good. Um.

It does not make for a fun gaming experience. You're almost guaranteed to fail miserably every time you game. Um. There are other problems as well. Some first person shooters, when you have latency issues, the computer itself will allow your character to keep running in whatever direction he she was running in at the time, and then when you reconnect, it will suddenly say, oops, he's actually across the map on the other side, which immediately makes everyone on the

opposing team think that you cheated. Hey, what happened? Hey what happened? Yeah? That uh, that happened to me. Actually, that's how I stopped playing Xbox Life because my internet broadband connection was so poor I couldn't maintain a game, and uh, I had a lot of people accusing me of cheating using standby, and I was not. I will have I want to go on the record, it was

my lousy internet connection. So at any rate, if I had this system, if I had the system at home and my internet connection was acting up, then my experience would not be very pleasant. The other big problem is if anything major happens to on Live, like the company goes out of business, Uh, you've lost all those games.

If somehow Sony went out of business tomorrow, you would still have your Sony PS two or p S three and all the games you had bought, and you could play those for as long as the machine would run and as long as those disks could could. You know, we're in good shape. But if on Live goes belly up, then you have no more games. So there are some risks, and those are common throughout all cloud computing applications, not

just gaming. It also is a is bad news for the PC market because, um, what you know, gaming rigs, that's what some of the highest end computer systems that that are that are available for personal computers. Right. Um, if suddenly the demand for that drops through the ground, Uh, companies aren't don't have the incentive to develop these really super fast processors. Um, and so we might actually see

Moore's law come to an end. Yeah, because you think about it, like, if all the computing is being done on the cloud and I don't need a powerful computer, you stop fueling into that cycle of let's develop even faster processors. There would be no financial incentive for them to do so. And then cats and dogs living together mass hysteria. How many more movie quotes are we gonna squeeze into this post? That's gonna be it, because I'm gonna I'm gonna move on to listener mail. Okay, totally

caught in one. That one. Okay, So today's listener mail comes from Sonny, and Sonny says, I recently subscribe to your podcast and have just caught up with all of the episodes. In the recent episode on how nanotechnology works, a listener asked if either of you had run Lennox or BSc. One of the concerns you had in regards to partitioning was in regards to partitioning and the subsequent difficulties that one might encounter when doing so if you're

not already familiar with it. Ubuntu comes with an installer called Wooby that will install Ubuntu alongside your Windows installation without the need for partitioning, and it gives a link and is tossed by being very simple and straightforward. And um, you know one of us has used a Buntu actually uh yeah, And as a matter of sin sence your send your email. UM, we acquired a test computer, UM from the the ranks of the um hobbled old machines

here the bowels of how storks dot com. Yeah. Yeah, we had to fight off some rog Yeah I was gonna see it works, but yeah, that's fine. UM anyway, and uh yeah, we installed actually we installed a copy of Windows seven the data and I said, you know what, this is a brand new installation. I'm not going to mess it up. I'm gonna go ahead and install the latest version of Ubuntu. And you're right. It worked. It was smooth as glass. And as a matter of fact, that old beat up PC I had at home, UM,

I did the same thing. And uh you know, I had it had some information on there that I was a little nervous about. But it did fine, and it works perfectly, and it just it goes where you you wanted to go and installs alongside beautifully and it works great. Yeah, thanks a lot, Sunny. So if you want to check that out, you can go and search for Ubuntu and and it's free, you know, so it's want to get get your hands on a on a free operating system.

It's got all the essentials in it, you know. Definitely check that out. Excellent. So if any of you have any further questions, concerns, comments, you know, corrections for those few times we get something wrong, send it to us tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Remember, we also have the blog tech stuff Live. You can find access to that at our home page at how stuff works dot com, as well as articles about everything from

cloud computing to video gaming. And we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready, are you