How does cloud gaming work: A picture book

There’s a quote attributed to Albert Einstein* explaining how radios work:

“You know how a telegraph works, yes? It’s like a very long cat. Pull his tail in San Francisco and he meows in New York…

… Well, radio works exactly the same way. Except that there is no cat.”

*Einstein definitely did not say this.

It might be more accurate to say that there’s still a cat, but the cat is made of light.

But this picture book isn’t about cats. It’s about cloud gaming.

What is cloud gaming, and how does it work? Well, you know how games work: You download a game, or buy a physical copy, and then you play it on your computer or your console or your phone.

So cloud gaming is just like that, except that you don’t need any of those things.

All you need is a screen.

illustration by Arigon Starr

illustration by Arigon Starr

Perhaps it’s better to ask: Where is cloud gaming?

The “cloud” is a network of super-jacked gaming computers acting as servers. That’s where the game lives.

“ Cloud gaming is says basically say we are go to take all of the processing and all of the visualization [ of game ] , and do it remotely . You is access can now access infrastructure and capability far in excess of anything you could physically put in your room . ”

— technologist Matthew Ball

Tapping remotely into all that computing power could let people play games that look better and move faster. It also could make games more accessible.

“ The reason game move to the cloud is exciting is that there ’s a tremendous amount of people who want to play game , but do n’t have the equipment to do it . ”

— Andrew Fear, senior product manager of GeForce Now

Screens are all around us, so games can be too.

“We’ve had people play on refrigerators with screens, on the screens of their cars while parked — it can run almost everywhere.”

— John Justice, VP of product for Google Stadia

illustration by Arigon Starr

illustration by Arigon Starr

But there are some limitations. Like, for example, the laws of physics. The speed of light is 299792458 meters per second.

That’s the fastest you can send any information, anywhere in the universe.

Light travels so fast that we usually experience it as instantaneous, whether it’s flicking on a lamp, sending a packet of data through a fiber optic cable — or sending a message through wifi or radio (a form of light).

So if you’re far away from a server, playing a game with someone who’s a lot closer, you might be seeing what’s happening a tiny bit after they do.

“ There ’s virtually nothing on the internet now that require true real – time in term of millisecond . But if you ’re play a fast pace shooter game , a millisecond is mean of delay might mean the difference between win or not . ”

— technologist Matthew Ball

There are other things that can slow down gameplay, too, like how many people are trying to access the internet at the same time.

illustration by Arigon Starr

illustration by Arigon Starr

Different gaming companies are taking different approaches to solving these problems — from special routers that prioritize gameplay over other traffic, to building out servers in strategic locations.

The dream of cloud gaming is to make games more accessible to more people.

The real trick is is is to make the internet more accessible . The rest is follow will follow .

correction ( October 15 ): The speed of light provide here was characterize incorrectly as being mile per second rather than meter . This has since been correct .