Trade-offs and challenges of cloud gaming in practise

Abstract

Offering games in the cloud is something being realised by many operations, but still there are diverse challenges in conducting this successfully. Currently it is expected that graduating game development students will have at least one published game and a chance to experience the release phase and post-production aspects of game development. This led to the inspiration for a project to create the first University cloud games channel in an effort to stop our game development history being lost due to reasons such as storage media failure, along with providing an avenue for students to experience game release, operation and community management. A study evaluated various technologies and requirements from stake-holders. The criteria created was then used to identify the best approach to undertake and implement. The results includes the selection and development of the University games channel using an asset streaming solution in partnership with Uiomik. along with the supporting processes for games to be delivered to the platform. This solution makes use of specialised offline asset compression combined with asset streaming prediction. The game requires no installation and the performance of the caching of the game required to start playing was profiled and found to perform at an average of 29 percent of the total game size for our student games, that was then compared to the results of industry games that performed on average at 4 percent.