Looking into the future and also predicting something, isn’t a very easy thing to do. For kind of obvious reasons. But let’s imagine one particular scenario anyway. You are at home, playing your favorite single-player game. It’s 5 pm already and you have to turn it off and stop playing because you have a flight leaving 2 and a half hours. So you have to go. You call yourself a cab and get to the airport. Few minutes before you arrive you get a message from your airlines that your flight has been delayed by 3 hours. It’s a pretty long way back home and you would also have to pay for 2 additional taxis, so you decide to just wait it out. This is, as many of you know, not that uncommon thing to happen. Nothing too special about it. But now, with that time on your hands, you head out to a specific room, where there are tens of screens with seatings prepared. You sit down in front of one of those, take the controller or a keyboard, and just continue to play the same game and the same save of that single-player game, as you were just before you left home. Right there, at the airport. Together with many people around you doing the same thing. Yea, just like in an arcade. But there aren’t any computers here. Just the screens with controllers. Let’s now talk a bit more about why this scenario is quite likely to happen. Even though it is still in the future because there are still some limitations that need to be sorted out. But the technology is already existing, and it's called cloud gaming. So what is cloud gaming? It’s basically what you would imagine from the name, or even the scenario I have just explained. It’s a service that streams the video output of a game via the internet into the screen you are watching. This means that all the computational power is located elsewhere. The game is rendered there and what you see is just the final output sent to you through the internet. Basically it acts similarly to streaming video or movies. So you don’t need any expensive hardware that way. You just need good internet and a screen, to run almost any game in full detail. But this technology and services are not new at all. Experiments began as early as 2006 and you might also remember the service called OnLive which started in 2009, but failed to achieve its goal and was shut down later in 2015. Well, it was actually acquired by Sony who is working on a similar technology to be implemented into their network. But the point is that technology companies know very well why there lies such a huge potential in cloud gaming services. Companies like Google, Nvidia, Sony, Microsoft running services like Parsec are all working on improving the technology and finding the best possible way of bringing this to gamers. Our cloud engineers are building a game streaming network To unlock console-quality gaming on any device. We see game streaming as great technology, giving you access to the games, that you want to play, on the device you want to play them on. The benefits of this technology are quite real. But first, it has to be said, that it probably never will be aimed at hardcore gamers. The ones that might benefit the most from this are casual gamers. What can be more practical than just starting a chrome browser and play a game instantly, without any installation, without any download, without any setup, in full details on the highest settings? This technology is not like VR for example. With VR the market is still finding out if people even want VR in their homes. It’s a different way of gaming and not for everybody. But cloud gaming is something almost everybody would like if it works properly. Instant gaming without much of a hustle. People will always prefer to immediately get what they want. Like it has always been. Another thing that speaks for Cloud gaming is the current game development industry. AAA companies have troubles everywhere you look, for like half a year now and it seems that almost every bigger game release is met with a smaller or larger uprising of the community. Bethesda, Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, Activision. People are getting tired of buying $60 priced unfinished games and it’s starting to show. Cloud gaming is a technology that would help indie developers get their games to wider audiences. Same as platforms like Steam did several years ago. It’s never been as easy to publish a small game as it is today. Speaking of Steam, more and more stores are emerging to be a competition to Steam. Like the Epic Store or a Discord store. It’s not a new thing, but these stores provide a higher percentage to developers of those games, which creates competition and again upliftsindie scene of game development. I am not talking about tons of bad, low quality,1 person games, which will also be the case of course. But it enables small studios to focus on quality and not yearly releases of the same IP over and over like we see in AAA companies. All of these things signal that the game development market is ready for a change. Big or small. And how did the entertainment markets changed till now? Well, we don’t have to look too far to find some examples. Starting with the music industry and continuing to the movie industry, both are moving, or you could say they already moved, to streaming, subscription-based services. Summarized in one sentence, the game development industry and gamers are ready for cloud gaming. It may bring a breath of fresh air into the industry. The AAA companies might not like that, but we gamers don’t like what they are doing as well. But even though we might be ready for a change, the technology is still not there. So let’s talk a bit about the downsides. You can imagine that technology behind the streaming movies and streaming a real-time fully rendered game that reacts to your mouse movements and other inputs with less delay than 30 ms, is quite different. If you read about the specific services that are offering Cloud gaming now as test projects, like a beta of Google Project Stream, Nvidia GeForce NOW, or Parsec, you will find similar opinions about them. That the technology is neat, very potential, but not mind-blowing just yet. Well, at least until you realize, that the game you are playing on the highest settings isn’t taking any computational power and run a full virus scan while playing without any change on a 6-year-old laptop. It seems like technology is mostly limited by internet speed. Google’s Project Stream requires 25 megabytes, not megabits per second, of a stable internet connection. But even if the internet is not 100% optimized you will first get degradation in video stream quality and not lagging. Which is amazing to me. Internet speeds are also getting higher every year and that’s also what these projects are counting on. Another thing we have to think about is how these services will be monetized. As I have said before, it can not be aimed primarily at hardcore gamers, because everybody like that already has a console or a PC. However, I have been a gamer my whole life as well, and even I can see the appeal of running AAA games in my chrome browser instantly. It can bring a huge new market into the equation and if the pricing will be set properly, it can be a success. It will of course take a while to be able to play competitive Counter-Strike or Fortnite in 4K without a PC, but that is not the aim of Cloud Gaming anyway. We will see how all this will turn out pretty soon I think. Several factors play into Cloud gaming and I think the year 2019 might be a very good year, maybe even revolutionary, for indie developers. Because of the ever-growing issues of the AAAgame development industry. But don’t think that I try to compare cloud-gaming to Netflix or something. I understand very well why we have Netflix and why we don’t have streaming of playable games. The point is that it’s a holy grail for technology companies and they are doing their best to get there. All these things combined are why I think cloud gaming has a bright future at the moment. Technology has still some way to go. But even today you can already see the potential. I have talked about the airport scenario, which is a little bit more science fiction at the moment, but even by seeing something like this you can imagine where this can lead us and why I think the gaming will look much different in upcoming years.