Streaming has taken over the TV and film industries. As recently as five years ago, platforms like YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Netflix have changed the living-room habits of millions of people, and changed movie production forever. Companies that adapted survived, and the viewing audience received a handful of clear benefits in return, most notably the ability to watch high-quality shows and movies on demand. More recently, an enormous amount of original award-winning content has furthered our options.
So now get ready for gaming. The idea of a “Netflix for games” service has been tossed around since long before video-streaming became a thing, but it hasn’t found a solid platform yet. Streaming games is a more complicated process than streaming video, since it adds user input to the mix. While being piped into a player’s home or phone from a server that could be hundreds of miles away, the game has to respond, without lag, to every button press a player makes. This requires more bandwidth, faster processing, and a whole slew of other variables. Without these, the games wouldn’t even be worth playing on these platforms.
The infrastructure and technology necessary for consumer-scale, seamless game-streaming is nearly here. Companies like Verizon, Sony, Amazon, Microsoft, Google NVIDIA and others are making plays in this space, and they finally have the broadband support and server dispersion necessary to roll out their own Netflix-style services as early as this year.Netflix for games
Streaming will alter the video game industry just like it did film and TV. On top of further disrupting the physical market (GameStop might just be the Blockbuster of the game-streaming apocalypse), distributors will likely hold an inordinate amount of power over a game’s visibility, pushing it onto the main screen or pulling it into the recesses of the search bar based on unknowable algorithmic variables. If each platform becomes as crowded as the App Store or Steam or even Netflix, this will mean smaller, independent games could find it difficult to grab screen time. Low visibility doesn’t just impact potential revenue — projected sales affect how much funding developers can secure from investors as well. Having said all of that, nothing is going to stop the cloud-gaming train, and Netflix seems to be one of the big front-runners that will come to market with a polished product.
