Why China is the perfect place for cloud gaming to succeed
Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud are pushing cloud gaming, but Tencent could be the real one to watch
You’d think the idea of playing any game on any device would be something gamers are interested in. Google and Microsoft, among many others, are investing heavily in the hope that they will be. But many are wary of cloud gaming.
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Some say that the latency of playing games in the cloud just won’t be fast enough. Others argue not about the technical aspect, but rather the point of it all. Who wants to play a big, sprawling PC game on a tiny smartphone?
But there’s one country that has all the pieces in place for cloud gaming to take off: China.
One of the big reasons China is perfect for cloud gaming? 5G.
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Think about it this way: Right now, your controller, TV and PlayStation 4 are in the same room as you are. Signals between all three only have a short distance to travel. But cloud gaming effectively takes that PS4 away from your room and puts it in a server farm, likely dozens of kilometers away. The signals from your controller and to your TV simply have much farther to travel, and that increased distance results in lag -- or, latency.
Faster speeds offer another huge advantage with visual fidelity. You’ve likely already seen this yourself with streaming video services like Netflix: The better your internet connection, the better the video quality.
The difference is that hardcore gamers are notoriously picky about visuals. And I sympathize. If your Netflix stream briefly suffers a drop in quality, well, Chandler’s face looks blurry for a few seconds. But if your game gets blurry in the few seconds that you’re ambushed by an enemy, well… you’re dead.
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Instead of playing mobile versions, cloud gaming allows you to play the real thing. You can play a huge game that won’t run on a phone… because it won’t run on a phone. It runs in the cloud and is streamed to the phone. Suddenly, cloud gaming could open up a huge library of PC and console titles to an enormous audience of smartphone gamers in China.
As a hardcore gamer, I’m not gonna lie: I hate playing these games on my iPhone. I hate using imprecise touchscreen controls. I hate the limited number of virtual buttons, compared to the many more on any console controller.
When the cloud gaming revolution comes, it’ll come to China first.
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