Is Cloud Gaming the Future of the Gaming Industry?

Cloud gaming is a system that has the potential to make virtually any video game, regardless of system requirements, to be played on almost any client. Put simply, this is accomplished by having servers that do all the graphic intensive computations normally done on a local machine, whether a game console or gaming computer, and sending the visual game frames to a thin client. This thin client is only responsible for displaying the received frames and subsequently sending back to the server the user commands. A system like this has the potential to remove costs from consumers and widen the range of people willing and able to play games that traditionally have required an expensive piece of hardware in-home to play. This paper provides an in-depth look into how cloud gaming works as a whole currently and also how it could work in the future. Many who believe that cloud gaming could essentially change the gaming industry have begun to propose improvements and even totally different approaches to the issues surrounding client gaming and this paper will discuss some of these proposals. This paper will also examine the games themselves and how developers may have to change the way they create and execute games to accommodate a growing cloud gaming market.