A report from Strategy Analytics, a Boston-based market researcher, says that the audience for cloud-gaming services such as ‘PlayStation Now’ from Sony and ‘Grid’ from Nvidia could grow from nearly 30 million users by the end of 2014, to nearly 150 million by the end of 2015. The cloud will have a huge impact on gaming – as we’ve begun to see in some of 2014’s biggest titles – but it’s what’s coming beyond 2015 which will show its true power…

Ensuring large textures are able to be stored in such low amounts of memory, and can be transferred in and out fast, will be vital to cloud-based gaming.

The Xbox team, through all of their reversals, has shouted about the cloud since their latest console’s announcement. Titanfall used it to offload some of its computations to provide the console with more local power for other activities – something which will increase as networks become more reliable. Forza on the other hand used it for “Drivatar” AIs which monitor in-game habits to place a replica of you and your friends’ driving into each other’s games – even whilst you’re offline.

But Sony isn’t sleeping either when it comes to the cloud. The company has announced their ‘PlayStation Now’ service which delivers streaming games in an impressive fidelity and little latency – despite still being in beta. Their approach is similar to OnLive who offered a similar service, but failed to gain mass appeal and collapsed back in 2012.

Of the two current approaches, Microsoft’s seems the most sensible. Doing most computation local but offloading more and more as infrastructure improves is the best way to go. For now, that means AI and dynamic weather. Once speeds and connections are reliable enough, we’ll start to see textures being streamed in real-time.

Due to latency issues, hardcore gamers are likely to stay away from streaming for some time.

It’s also worth remembering one core thing – Microsoft is a cloud player, Sony isn’t. The latter’s financials also prevent them from investing as much in this area whereas Microsoft are adding servers almost daily to power all the services which use Azure and even introduced a dedicated 300,000 server architecture just for their console.

That demo video above turned out to be a prototype from Crackdown 3, a title due to be released in 2016. At BUILD the year before, the team showed hardware-based tiled resource support added in DX11.2 which allows 3GBs worth of textures to be stored in just 16MB of RAM. Ensuring large textures are able to be stored in such low amounts of memory, and can be transferred in and out fast, will be vital to cloud-based gaming in the years to come.

In 2015, we are sure to see cloud streaming of games gain in appeal. Sony and Nvidia will lead the path, but is it really worth it when the experience is the same? Plus due to latency, however small, hardcore gamers are sure to steer away from pure streaming for some time.

2016 and beyond is where we’ll see the potential of cloud-based gaming. We’ll continue to see advancements throughout 2015 which will continue the trend set by the likes of Titanfall and Forza, but once developers have had time to get used to the new generation of tools and hardware, it’s at that point we’ll start to see the “true” power of cloud gaming…

How much potential do you think the cloud has for gaming? Let us know in the comments.