Gaming is the new Soap Opera

Gaming is a phenomenon, a culture that cuts across all sections of society. While gaming was always seen as a hobby for geeky kids playing 64-bit games on a bright CRT screen in the basement, it has broken out of that shackle in the past couple of years. What makes gaming so attractive? What is the future? Stadia? Streaming? ??

Back in the 1990s, gaming was the stronghold of the Japanese with Nintendo and Sony battling it out with funky games which till today are extremely playable. Then there was also Atari. While this age saw games sell by the million in flaky cartridges, the complexity of the games kept going up with ever higher graphics and richer sound. With the dawn of the millennia, Microsoft entered the space with the iconic Xbox and the famous Halo series as their war cry into this competitive space. Microsoft sold Xbox as a solid gaming device with a compelling title selection to boot. Again, all this was a precursor to the launch of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 during the second half of the first decade. Nintendo with its Wii unleashed a new paradigm of gaming with heavy reliance on motion and movement compared to the traditional joystick-based approach.

While the above may serve as a refresher into the dynamics of gaming, another key technology usurped the gaming industry. Enter the iPhone! ??

Back in 2007 when Steve Jobs announced that the humble iPod had a touchscreen and a cellular modem built into it, little did he envision that the device mainly meant for listening to music and to be used as a phone, would usher in a new era of gaming. ?? The iPhone along with the Android devices allowed devs to target an entirely new demographic with games. This led to the rise of Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and other memorable titles. While traditionally these were brushed off as chunk change by bigger game developers, it so happened that the adoption of mobile phones was faster than anything mankind had ever done before. With bigger screens and better processors, devs were able to push pixels to the brim and create stunning gaming experiences on a smaller screen. Mobile phones also bought in a new crowd and a new business model to bank upon. Suddenly games which were free up front but had the oft-hated micro transactions made more money than bigger titles which retailed at $59.99. The humble phone was now pulling in more people and revenue for companies and this surprised many industry watchers ??

With smartphones becoming a constant fixture in every person’s life, the mobility of the medium allowed some innovative gameplay possibility. Suddenly multiplayer mode was practical on your daily commute. Phones also allowed a degree of freedom for companies to experiment with newer gameplay experiences with some relying on motion sensors and others relying on camera. This also paved the way for the diminishing sales of handheld consoles like PSP and PS Vita. Sony announced PS Vita discontinuation in 2019.

While the mobile phones were busy occupying the mind share of the general public, those screens opened up opportunities in places where none existed. With the rise of connected devices and better connectivity gaming is on the rise. While the traditional consoles still pack in a punch and allow some amazing game experiences, companies see them as one more medium for gaming rather than the main pillar.

This has led to some interesting outcomes. While gaming traditionally meant beefy graphics chips and big rigs, the next crop of devices may just be a dongle attached to your video output. The direction of the next crop of devices align in the direction in which the world is moving to as a whole, which is the cloud. Cloud is a piece of tech which has been embraced by many traditional tech offerings from media players to storage. While cloud computing was still a wet dream for many due to the relatively expensive proposition of running a data centre and then distributing the content globally, with the rise of cloud services, these problems have mostly gone away. I refer to that as mostly because there are some teething troubles which I will go into later. For gaming, where even a fraction of a second puts you on the losing side, ensuring a consistent gaming experience is an oft mentioned and greatly heralded as a high bar to achieve. Even gaming on a dedicated connection via ethernet on a relatively high-speed network still induces a lag when ping levels rise due to various network conditions. While this is tolerable since the game is running on the local machine, things change acutely when you are streaming the game wholesale from a server. ??

Pushing megabytes of video, audio over the internet with users spread across a wide region poses challenges. A serious one at that. This is why game-cloud streaming services were a hit or miss depending upon where you sat on this planet and how merciful your ISP was towards you when you were actually playing the game. PS Now, the now-defunct OnLive were some of the early bets on this. While OnLive failed, PS Now and the upcoming Xbox Cloud are taking the same approach but with more refinement. Google’s newly announced Stadia, also leverages on this phenomenon and aims to be a big player.

While cloud gaming may be exciting and futuristic, it was inevitable. Edge computing started with cloud storage and is now moving to other aspects of computing/media consumption. So the move to cloud for gaming was inevitable. This trend was evident when Microsoft launched Xbox Game Pass. While the Xbox Gold membership facilitated multiplayer and free games to boot, the Game Pass was the subtle way Microsoft wanted to kickstart the gaming-as-a-subscription, a la Netflix of games. With Gamepass Microsoft is moving towards a future where you pay for access to games rather than own them outright. The obvious concern with this model is that without paying a monthly fee you are cut off from gaming. Lending that disc to your buddy after you are done playing? Tough luck. The flip-side of the digital model is that the ownership model changes and you no longer can claim to have a game. Sure you can purchase it, but with a subscription like Gamepass, it makes more financial sense for the average consumer to have a library of games available than building out his game library meticulously over the years. Most importantly this means that the humble box in your living room will be reduced to a dongle for streaming data packets than actually processing them locally. This is a big shift in the way consoles traditionally work and operate.

All these changes lead to a fundamental question as to why so much of change is underway in the gaming world. After all, weren’t games supposed to be a school kid’s hobby limited to dingy basements and dull rooms? 

Gaming is much more than driving a car or wielding a gun to kill bad guys. The scope of gaming has expanded beyond the tightly defined norms and now is seen as an experience. This also means expansion to newer markets, experimenting with varied styles, price points, hardware and much more. The change is also driven by the fact that gaming is a big revenue generator. This is a lucrative opportunity for any developer, artist, company and more recently the streaming companies which occupy various points in the process of making a game or marketing them. The gaming industry was estimated to be nearly 140 billion dollars in 2018 and is expected to have healthy growth in the coming years. This combined with the onslaught of VR, portable gameplay etc makes gaming an ever-changing landscape with tremendous opportunity for growth.

All these points make more sense when you think about cloud gaming. Cloud gaming though in its infancy is already seen the next battleground for games. Unlike the previous console wars, this round will be dominated by those who have a strong cloud presence. Microsoft with Xcloud service, Google with Stadia and Amazon with its rumoured gaming cloud service all seem to leverage their existing cloud prowess to grab a share of the market. Sony which is hardware first, software second company may have to ramp up its division to compete with the Big 3. While they may have a stellar catalogue of games, their cloud infrastructure is almost non-existent, if not for the PS Now and existing PSN services. Nintendo may step into this few years later with a Mario themed cloud game drumming up the hype, in typical Nintendo fashion. The big player missing in this context is Apple which till recently has focussed on hardware rather than software/services. Apple has millions of iOS devices having capable hardware and till date has some of the best games available on any mobile platform. Many games launch first on the iOS platform and then get released on Android. iOS also has a tremendous amount of accessory support. These key factors allow Apple to leverage its existing install base and push gaming on mobile devices to newer boundaries. Candy Crush or Call of Duty, are games, end of the day, irrespective of their dissimilarity. Gaming as a whole is undergoing massive changes in the medium in which they are delivered to the end user and the device on which the game runs.

And you thought Candy Crush was child’s play? ;)