A Survey on Strategies, Trends, Economics, and Prospects of Cloud-Based Gaming

Cloud Gaming Over Traditional Gaming

Traditional games that are played by humans are programmed into applications. These programmed applications are called as traditional computer games (Wikipedia, Traditional game, 2015). Video games were not familiar with people until the introduction of computers. Cathode ray tube amusement device is the first known gaming device with a display. This device did not have any storage device or computer program and was totally based on analog signals. After analog games, in the year 1952, interactive visual gaming came into existence. These devices were huge in size and were not available to the public. In 1962 first digital video game called Spacewar was invented by students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This game made a revolution among the computer users and got installed on several of the computers. The familiarity of this digital video game made programmers concentrate on the development of the gaming technology. Due to demand and novelty of the gaming among the general public in the year, 1972 commercial video gaming industry came into existence (Wikipedia, Early history of video games, 2014). Personal computer advancements and easy accessibility to the general public nurtured the invention of numerous PC games. Consoles specially designed for playing games were invented and targeted gamers. The invention and advancement in mobile phones paved the way for mobile cloud gaming (Robinson, 2012). The usefulness of World Wide Web made programmers to develop social network games (Wikipedia, Origins of the computer game, 2014). From cathode ray tube amusement device, game development evolved into various forms and attained the cloud gaming in the year 2009 (Kent, 2001). In Figure 1, the evolution of cloud gaming from the traditional gaming is depicted.

Figure 1.

Evolution of cloud gaming