During a recent investment question and answer session, Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata stated that he finds it strange that people think that cloud gaming is the wave of the future. In fact, he feels that it could hurt the gaming industry, especially action based games that would be hurt by the lag.
Iwata had much to say on the subject. Hit the jump for his quotes:
“A cloud is an attempt to process information online on a server, as opposed to doing so on individual machines in the hands of the users.”
“What this implies is, since the time to transmit data over an internet connection is never negligible, there is always some latency before you receive the result of your input.”
“Of course, there are types of games on which delays have no effect. In such instances, it may perhaps make sense to have an input means as well as the ability to display images at hand and let all the information be processed on a server. On the other hand, for some highly interactive games, action games in particular, the time required to reflect the push of a button on the screen is critical and the frame rate (the number of times a screen can be updated in a given second) determines the fluidity of the movements.”
“This means that there are some types of games that can be put on the internet and others that cannot. By the laws of physics, it always takes some time to transmit data, and given the current level of internet technology, there is bound to be some latency during the processes of a server receiving data, producing images instantly and sending them back.”
“There are many things that cloud gaming cannot do by design, but this fact has not been communicated well to the public, and I find it strange that many people claim that cloud gaming is the future.”
Personally, I am not a fan of most could based gaming. To me, owning a physical copy of the game that I can play anytime/anywhere is just a good feeling. My fear with cloud gaming is that it is not permanent. For example, lets say I buy a game from company A. Maybe it is a large MMO, an FPS, etc. I invest a lot of time and money into the game. Company A closes its doors and turns off its servers. Now, all of my time and money is wasted on a game that I will never be able to play again. The same could potentially happen to older games that have run their cycle. I still enjoying playing the original Mario Bros. every now and then when bored. However, if it were originally cloud based, would I still have that opportunity?
What are your thoughts on the matter?
"…given the current level of internet technology…" that's the key part. We are not ready yet, but I'm sure we will in the future.