Face, cloud gaming
Valve’s Gabe Newell gave us his thoughts on cloud gaming this morning at his D.I.C.E. Summit keynote, saying that he’s a skeptic of the technology. While he backs in-home streaming as a solution for getting PC games on living room televisions, he doesn’t feel that cloud technology is up to snuff.
Newell feels that cloud gaming works until it becomes successful. As soon as everyone starts using a continuous network connect, pricing will go through the roof for users. He also feels that current technologies put latency compensation in the wrong place — in the center rather than the edge.
Finally, Newell says that if you want to have a standard client out tree, there are much better approaches than sending video, though he didn’t elaborate.
Looking forward, Valve feels that latency sensitivity will increase in the future. They believe that there will be hardware in the near future that will be more sensitive to latency than humans are. What crazy technology are Valve playing with behind the scenes?
[image from a Threadless shirt design]
