New gaming battleground lies in the cloud

Crackdown, on Xbox One, will use cloud computing to render the destruction of entire city blocks

Maurizio Sciglio has a problem. For three years he has been developing a technology that harnesses the power of the internet to supercharge the capabilities of games consoles, PCs, and even smartphones. 

The problem? His technology falls under the catch-all term "cloud gaming", a somewhat toxic phrase associated with false dawns and failures. It's a dilemma akin to creating a next-generation operating system - and having to call it Windows 8.

Maurizio Sciglio believes that most games will be using cloud computing within five years.

In 2013, Mr Sciglio co-founded Edinburgh-based Cloudgine. His company uses the near-limitless power of cloud server farms to compute complex tasks and send the results to a device in milliseconds.

Onlive promised that entire games could be streamed seamlessly to many internet-enabled devices

In theory that means a games console could share, or completely offload, complicated calculations while it focuses its brainpower on something else. "We identified that there was not enough compute power available on consoles and PCs," Mr Sciglio said.


A PC's Central Processing Unit (CPU) - the brains where the calculations take place - are pretty limited against the "essentially unlimited power of resource" of Microsoft's Azure or Google Cloud, he says.

"To be honest, pretty much everything in a game is difficult to run from a CPU perspective. So what we do is offload the tasks and run them in the cloud. We're essentially borrowing power from the internet," he says.

Delayed reaction

If Mr Sciglio's comments seem familiar, that might be because it echoes the rhetoric of cloud computing firm Onlive, which in 2009 promised a future where games were rendered on server farms and seamlessly streamed to homes over the internet.
It was meant to be the games equivalent of Spotify, opening the chance to enjoy the latest interactive entertainment on even modestly powered machines.
The next Grand Theft Auto, the theory went, would be played on an Apple TV, or any middleweight device, providing it had a high-speed broadband connection.
Some analysts valued Onlive at $1.8bn. But after two years of underperformance, in August 2012 the company laid off all its workers, and its assets were eventually sold for less than $5m.
"We've been thinking hard about what to call our technology," Mr Sciglio says. "If we call it cloud gaming then people will think of Onlive and it won't really help our reputation."
Onlive had many challenges. but perhaps the most difficult was latency, or time delay. It is the perceivable amount of time players wait for a game to send commands to a data centre and then send back the results.