The rise of cloud gaming is going to mean the death of the dream of #web3 games, an open #metaverseand a decentralised future. Why?
What Is Cloud Gaming?
The term “cloud gaming” refers to playing a video game remotely from the cloud where all the game's processing is done away from the client machine and the game is then 'streamed' back to the device for you to play.
Microsoft's xCloud is a prime example of this just now, where there is no need to install the game onto the Xbox - you can just stream it if you have a good enough broadband connection. With the advent of 5G, this means you could play a game on any device capable.
“Cloud gaming offers seamless portability. Users will no longer need to buy expensive consoles or PC components to play high-end games. Instead, users can transition from one device to another, indoor or outdoor, without hampering their game sessions or high-quality gaming experience.
Cloud gaming provides players freedom with its mobility factor, meaning gaming can truly be a mobile experience.” -Rupantar Guha, GlobalData
Microsoft, Sony, Google, and Amazon, they're all beefing up their services to offer this, Netflix is hot on their heels after proving out their tech with television streaming content and there is a myriad of smaller startups offering high-spec NVIDIA machines to gamers who don't want to pay huge prices for the best PCs. Even services like Hadean and Improbable come under this, offering infrastructure to allow huge worlds and massive amounts of players to scale by spinning up endless virtual machines.
So Why is This a Bad Thing for Web3 Games and Metaverse?
Because it's all centralised, everything will sit on Big Tech server architecture, in Big Tech server farms. There will be no getting away from it.
And then the devices will get simpler - essentially becoming a thin client - a dumb machine that has enough processing just to handle the throughput while everything is done for it on infrastructure owned by someone else.
Which, on the surface, sounds wonderful of course, no more need for behemoth consoles under the TV or huge PC towers sitting on top of your desk.
But the idea of decentralisation at the core of Web3 should mean that these services and infrastructure is distributed, the same goes for an open metaverse - it's back to the core tenet of what the web was back in the early 90s. By pushing everything to the cloud you're essentially giving all that control to the centralised power structures you're trying to get away from in the first place.
Arguably, even Otherside by Yuga Labs by this definition will never be Web3 despite being the best example we have of blockchain gaming and a push towards a metaverse style environment.
People joke that cloud computing is just using someone else's computer. But what's another name for a thin client? A slave machine.
Makes you think.
